This is the
moment
of truth
IT'S the Big 'Un tomorrow against the Lions.. Can the Sharks upset precedent and win a home game? Can they repeat the form they showed in the Antipodes?
Everything rides on it because the local log is tighter than a duck's ass, as they say in the classics, and that's watertight. From now we have to win every one to get into the play-offs.
A story is running about that the Sharks management have hired a hypnotist to tell the guys they're playing at Christchurch, not Durban, and this will get the best out of them. It's superficially plausible but sounds like wishful thinking.
Nothing can get us away from the reality that tomorrow we have to play out of our socks. We have to tackle the way we have all season, and some. We have to dominate up front. We have to play to our strengths in the backline.
No silly buggers stuff. Hold on to our passes. Be adventurous but not stoopid. Hou kop.
In short, let's play to the ability everyone knows we have. Let's get it all together. Let's give an extra zest to the traditional celebratory feu de joie when the streetlights are shot out with catapults fashioned from the knicker elastic of the damsels of the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties. It's now or never.
'Erewego, 'erewego, 'erewego!
Eye-opener
A CUSTOMER thought his eyes needed testing again after he popped in at his opticians' to get a bottle of eyedrops and the till rang up an amount of more than £4 billion (R74 billion).
It happened in Wrexham, North Wales, according to Sky News, where the amount of £4 billion plus would have covered more than half the Welsh national health bill for the year.
Martin Chidlow said he didn't have quite that amount of cash on him. Would they mind if he used his card?
"I'd recently had my eyes tested and I'd popped in to get the prescription and get the eyedrops because I get dry eyes.
"I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the price on the screen, I'm glad I'd just had them tested.
"It wasn't human error, it was a problem with the computerised till."
He ended up paying £9.95.
Isipingo English
EARLIER this week we discussed Isipingo English as a component of the Anglo-Saxon tongue as spoken in this part of the world, others being Benoni English and Queen's English (Maritzburg), as well as various bits of Afrikaans and Zulu.
However, I am corrected by none other than raconteur Spyker Koekemoer (aka Pat Smythe), who hails originally from Isipingo.
"The Isipingo Lingo has no need of a relationship with English, Zulu or Afrikaans. It is its own master and facilitates great dexterity of tongue when sampling lamb curry with cane spirit gravy, while completing another recount of the Freedom Front votes in Hibberdene."
I take his point. The recount? As the great Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder put it: "Ex Isipingo semper aliquid novi." (Out of Isipingo, always something new).
Tailpiece
VOICEMAIL: "Hi, John's answering machine is broken. This is his refrigerator. Please speak very slowly and I'll stick your message to myself with some of these magnets."
Last word
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
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