The Idler, Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Crazy gun laws

IF EVER there was a moment that highlights the absurdity of America's lack of effective gun control, it must surely be the tragic slaughter in Orlando, Florida. Any nutcase or terrorist is able to walk into a gun store and buy over the counter the means to inflict mayhem.

This is what appears to have happened in Orlando. The culprit apparently bought his weapons just days before putting them to deadly use.

The National Rifle Association and other gun lobbyists point to the section of the constitution that guarantees the right of citizens to bear arms. But that was drafted at a time when "arms" meant single-shot muzzle-loading muskets or powder and ball pistols, not automatic rifles with their lethal capacity to spray bullets about.

This must surely bring a new dimension to the presidential election in November. How will somebody like Donald Trump, with a right-wing support base that includes the NRA, square what has happened with the right to bear arms? Does that right extend to a citizen who, before the attack, phoned the police to declare his allegiance to a terrorist organisation?

This will be a bitter one, not least because the outcome of the election also has a bearing on appointments to the Supreme Court bench. And that bench is likely to be the final decider, whatever might happen – or not happen – in Congress about gun control

It's a crazy world.

Riddle solved

A WEEK or so back we considered a very old riddle about three guests who book into a hotel at R10 a night (yes, a very old riddle) and pay as they check in.

The hotel proprietor decides to give them an overall discount of R5. He tells a maid to take the R5 upstairs to refund them. But she can't divide R5 by three so she gives each guest R1 and takes R2 for herself.

So the three guests each pay R9 – R27. The maid takes R2 – total R29. What happened to the R1?

I receive a stern admonition from Clifford Joshua, of Morningside. The riddle is incomplete in its incorrectness, he says.

He provides a series of mathematical formulae to demonstrate this, somewhat baffling to an innumerate like myself, but showing convincingly nevertheless that the R1 did not disappear, nor did the maid tuck it into her bra.

The closing argument is 30 - 3-2 = 25 – what the proprietor got paid.

I hope this settles things. If not, it's something that needs to be taken to Nkandla for adjudication.

 

Passing phase

A HOTEL room for R3? In days of yore I used to check in at the Rosetta Hotel, in the Midlands. The rate for bed and breakfast was R1.25.

When I paid the first time I was there I was given a receipt for twelve shillings and sixpence. (It was a few years after the change-over to decimal coinage).When I questioned this, the owner explained: "This decimal thing is just a passing phase. I'm not going to get a new cash register for those bloody fools in Pretoria."

 

Churchill

ANOTHER time at the Rosetta Hotel, the parking area was already full of vehicles when I arrived in the evening. I'd heard it on the radio: Churchill had died.

Every farmer in the district was there. So were the local police force. Everyone had descended on the pub to talk about Churchill. There was no TV in those days but everyone was glued to the BBC radio stuff that was coming over. Wartime stories suddenly burst forth from fellows who had submerged it all over the years.

Hey, what a party. And this was happening all over the world in hundreds, thousands of localities. It was quite an evening in Rosetta.

My bill next day was a little more than twelve shillings and sixpence.

 

SABC

 

A FELLOW who calls himself "Dan from the Bluff" sends in this limerick, inspired by goings-on at the SABC.

 

There was a man named Hlaudi,

Whose mind turned a bit cloudy;

As he sat and twiddled his thumb,

Thinking of ways not to look dumb,

His actions instead turned people rowdy.

 

Attaboy, Dan!

 

Tailpiece

"I just bought my mother-in-law a Jaguar."

"I thought you didn't like her."

"I know what I'm doing. It's bitten her twice already."

Last word

 

I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that. Mitch Hedberg