| Year of the cat DRUMMERS Taiwanese and local got together at Inanda Dam last weekend for a Duelling Drums exposition of traditional Chinese drumming, interspersed with traditional African and western. It was in aid of Ethekwini municipality's Green Corridor project. The DJ compere urged the crowd to greet the Taiwanese guests in Chinese. "Say Ni-hau!" "Meow!" they chorused. At which everyone fell about laughing and they went on with the show. That's the spirit! Leap these language barriers! Blooperfest GUPTA TV – ANN7 – got off to a start replete with bloopers the other day, some of them so hilariously gauche that they went viral on YouTube and the Twittersphere. According to one source, a football score was edited from "0-0" to "No-No". However, the YouTube stuff soon disappeared, the clips apparently infringement of an Indian company's copyright. One of the best lines to come out of the episode is from radio talkshow host and newspaper columnist Eusebius McKaiser. Playing on the confusion over whether former President Nelson Mandela had or had not been discharged from hospital, he tweeted: "ANN7 reports Mandela has NOT been discharged from Robben Island." Heh, heh! No news today THE PERILS of live broadcasting. Once when I was in Lesotho there was some consternation – given the country's turbulent politics – when the early morning news came on with an announcement: "There is no news today. We will listen to light music." Had there been a coup d'etat? No, the newsreader had stopped off at the gents' on his way to the studio. It was in the predigital era and he had accidentally dropped his typed news bulletin in the urinal. He refused to fish out and try to read the soggy mess, so Lesotho listened to light music while people ran around finding his carbon copies. He would be a natural for Gupta TV. Time and motion HERE'S an exercise in time and motion study. How do you properly place new employees? You put 400 bricks in a closed room. Put your new employees in the room and close the door. Leave them alone and come back after six hours. Then analyse the situation. If they're counting the bricks, put them in Accounting. If they're recounting, put them in Auditing. If they've messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering. If they're arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning. If they're throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations. If they'e sleeping, put them in Security. If they' broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology. If they're sitting idle, put them in Human Resources. If they say they have tried different combinations and they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales. If they've already left for the day, put them in Marketing. If they're staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning. If they're talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management. Finally, if they've surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard from, get them seconded to Government. |
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Tailpiece
A WOMAN awakes to find her husband is not in their bed. She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of hot coffee in front of him. He is staring blankly at the wall. He wipes a tear from his eye and takes a sip of coffee.
"What's the matter, dear? Why are you down here this time of night?"
"I'm just remembering when we first met 20 years ago and started dating. You were only 16. Do you remember back then?"
She's touched to tears herself. "Yes, I do."
"Do you remember when your father caught us on the back seat of my car?"
"Yes, I remember."
"Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said: "Either you marry my daughter or I will send you to jail for 20 years?"
"I remember that too." She speaks very softly.
He wipes another tear from his cheek: "'I would have been released today."
Last word
Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
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