The Idler, Monday, July 8, 2019

Stirring

up a wasps'

nest

 

LAST week we discussed an incident at Richmond Country Club where I arrived for a golf tournament, only for a cloud of angry hornets to issue from the boot of my car when I opened it, proceeding to sting bystanders (but leave myself untouched).

They had established a large nest in the bottom of my golf bag, which I had not used in years. They were greatly irritated by being jolted about in the boot of a car.

But I'm told by reader Charles Botha that there are no hornets in South Africa.

"There is a foreign introduced species in the Cape, but all the local ones are wasps. All hornets are of the wasp family, but the wasps we have are not hornets."

Now Charles is a former chairman of the Wildlife and Environment Society in this province. He knows his wasps from his hornets.

That incident at Richmond was a while ago so it's a bit late now to produce Charles as a witness to the falsity of the accusations made against me at the time – that I deliberately set a cloud of angry hornets upon innocent golfers; that I had maliciously trained them for the attack, as evidenced by the fact that they did not sting me, their trainer. It got quite heated in the bar that evening.

But as Charles says, there are no hornets in South Africa. Nobody said a thing about wasps.

M'lud, I rest my case.

 

 

Crayfish

 

THE above recalls another case of colloquial inexactitude. This fellow on the North Coast had been grabbed by the shad sheriffs for poaching crayfish.

He appeared in court. There he produced evidence from several encyclopaedias describing the crayfish as a freshwater crustacean in North America.

The same encyclopaedias described the creature found in our waters as the "spiny rock lobster". That did not appear in the charge sheet, which spoke of "crayfish".

Hey, clever fellow. Case dismissed? Alas, no.

The Afrikaans version of the same provincial ordinance spoke of "kreef". A kreef is a kreef, unheard of in the fresh waters of North America. He was found guilty of poaching kreef.

Here was a case of colloquial inexactitude actually getting into the statute books – the English version anyway.

 

 

Chomp, chomp

WHILE Donald Trump seemed to be trying to add a Hanoi-style military touch to the Fourth of July parade in Washington last week, in New York things were more traditional.

On the boardwalk at Coney Island, Joey "Jaws" Chestnut chomped his way through 71 hot dogs in 10 minutes to win Nathan's Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, which has been going since 1916.

This marked Chestnut's 12^th winning of the "Mustard Belt", though he failed to equal the world record of 74, he set up last year, according to USA today..

In the women's section, reigning champion Miki Sudo managed 31 to hold her title.

We're not told if they went to a hamburger joint afterwards to celebrate.

 

 

Two wins

I TOLD you the Proteas would beat Australia. Too late, nothing at stake – it just shows how much of the malady is in the kop.

And Bafana beat Egypt. Maybe we're  getting up off the canvas.

Tailpiece

IT'S the jet age. Breakfast in Rome, lunch in Paris, dinner in London – luggage in Singapore.

Last word

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. - PJ O'Rourke