Knickers now optional
LIONS versus Otago Highlanders tomorrow, the only South African side in the Super Rugby semis. One watches with a certain detachment - you just can't generate the same excitement and support when it's not your side.
For that reason knickers are optional for the damsels of the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties – no feu de joie and no need for knicker elastic to fashion catapults to shoot out the streetlights.
But we'll watch with definite admiration for what the Lions have achieved.
And what a reflection on our game nationally. The Lions got there by being sidelined for three years and more. No Springboks, no big names, relegated from Super Rugby.
They got down to rediscovering the game; rediscovering a sense of adventure and playing just for the hell of it.
And look how it's paid off – a side playing rugby the way it's meant to be played, a 15-man team with the chemistry exactly right.
It's an object lesson where so much has gone adrift in this professional era.
Last Saturday the Sharks were on the canvas, just the way the Lions were four years ago. The only way to go is upward.
Will we make a start in the Currie Cup?
Lion tamer
A BLAST from the past. Last week we had a Tailpiece concerning a lady lion tamer who calmed a lion by stripping naked and having it lick her all over – and a golfer who said he could do better so long as they got that lion out of there.
Next I get a phone call from a real lion tamer. None of the people at Brian Boswell's Circus (which is in town at the moment) had heard that one before, he said. They were most amused.
The caller is one Gavin Telford who, some years ago now, spent a spell between circuses working in the advertising make-up department of this newspaper group. Known to all as the Lion Tamer, Gavin could be persuaded to take his shirt off and show you the scars from encounters with the big cats.
He told of an occasion in Limpopo province when he was in the chemist's buying antiseptic after a clawing the night before. A woman was talking excitedly to the staff: "Julle moet die sirkus sien. Dis fantasties! Die bloed!" (You must see the circus. It's fantastic! The blood!).
Gavin went back to the circus from newspapers, though he's no longer in the ring with the lions and tigers. "I started off in the circus. Then I went into newspapers and that was an even bigger circus. So I went back to the real circus for a quiet and sensible life."
I wonder if he's looking for clowns? There are quite a few at the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties.
Purple orb
A MYSTERIOUS purple orb has been spotted on the seabed during a live-streamed TV ocean exploration by the vessel Nautilus, near the Channel Islands of Californiua.
Scientists directing the exploration are stumped for an answer, according to Sky News. The orb looks as if it could be some kind of egg sac.
It's probably got something to do with this Pokemon craze.
Treeman
A FELLOW in Venice Beach, California, gets onto stilts every day, then wriggles into a "tree" costume – branches, foliage, flowers – and takes up station on one of the town's streets, standing very still.
Then, just as people are getting used to this tree, he starts jumping about, shaking hands with them – freaking them out.
Lionel "Treeman" Powell is campaigning to make people appreciate trees. "What I'm doing here is called a tree awakening," he says, according to the Huffington Post. "People are so busy they don't get to stop and smell the roses."
"I get many different reactions, but 90% of people are awed. Mostly what I get after the surprise of startling someone is laughter."
He doesn't say what kind of encounters he's had with the dogs of Venice Beach.
Tailpiece
A TRAVELLING salesman stops by at the Johnson farm down in ol' Tennessee.
"Is your husband home, ma'am."
"Sure is. He's over to the hawgs shed."
"I got somethin' I'd like to show him, ma'am. Will I find him easy?"
"Should be. He's the one with the beard and moustache."
Last word
The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
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