The Idler, Thursday, November 18, 2010

Another fairytale unfolds

IT'S ASTONISHING how the supposedly antiquated and politically and intellectually backward institution of monarchy strikes a chord all over the world. A TV channel the other night showed newsreaders bringing the story of Prince William's engagement to Kate Middleton in Russia, France, Germany, China, America, Australia, and several European countries I couldn't identify. There was no mistaking their enthusiasm.

Why should this be? Is it really the "fairytale" factor? Do the Chinese, say, have their own fairytales about the humble girl being courted by the handsome prince? Maybe they do, I just don't know.

Or is it that monarchy actually does play a vital role in society – above politics, a focus of national pride, a rallying point and a lot of fun?

Is it coincidence that Spain, for instance, has moved from a bitter civil war to a prolonged fascist dictatorship, to political and economic freedom – under a constitutional monarchy?

Makes ya think.

In Britain itself, of course, there is vocal opposition to the institution of monarchy, mainly among the intellectual chattering classes. How lonely they must feel at times like these.

 

 

Cabinet cheer

BRITISH prime minister David Cameron says news of the engagement was greeted with a cheer around the cabinet table in No 10 Downing Street.

I'll bet. There's nothing like a royal wedding to take the mind of the public off the austerity measures that are being introduced. Bread and circuses? That would perhaps be unfair, but it's not altogether off the mark.

Will this royal wedding be a lavish bash? At a time of austerity it's a tricky one. Yet at the time Queen Elizabeth married Prince Phillip (she was then still a princess) Britain was in even worse post-war austerity. The people themselves insisted on whooping it up. It could turn out the same this time.

 

 

The shadow

OF COURSE, there's a shadow to all this. William's mother also had a "fairytale" romance that went sour, lapsed into soap opera and spun into tragedy. It was cringe-making to watch old footage of Princess Diana running the gauntlet in the streets of London of the paparazzi who eventually killed her in Paris.

There's no reason to believe anything similar should happen this time. William and Kate seem an exceptionally well-balanced and good-humoured pair.

But their minders need to carefully plot course. Royal romance has a great potential for schmaltz, which so easily becomes soap opera. It's the natural habitat of the agony aunts of Fleet Street, not to mention the professional royal-watchers, whose qualification for the job has always escaped me.

But I'd guess William and Kate can rise above it.

The script

IS THERE a more ordinary middle-class name than Kate Middleton?

Stand by for William to be created Duke of Somewhere-or-other so Kate can become Duchess.

The royals know how to write a script.

Old 'un

WILL the royal wedding be the occasion for the return of an old joke that first surfaced at the time of the coronation in 1953?

A South African has been celebrating so hard in London that a pub refuses to serve him. Slowly and deliberately he takes a matchbox from his pocket and empties on to the bar counter a pair of white ants.

"Okay, boys. Wreck the joint!"

 

Windfall vase

A CHINESE vase discovered during a routine clear-out of a house in London has fetched £51 million at auction, leaving the sellers flabbergasted.

The 18th century work of art, a masterpiece from the Qinglong dynasty, was expected to sell for between £800 000 and £1.2m.

But the bidding attracted many Chinese buyers seeking a piece of their imperial past and the bidding went into the stratosphere. The price fetched astonished both the auctioneers and the owners, a mother and son from Ruislip. Nobody can remember how the vase ended up in their home.

I wonder about that imperial past bit. Did somebody put out the story that the vase was packed with powdered rhino horn, a lifetime's supply of male potency?

Tailpiece

PUB MENU:  "A pie, a pint and a kind word: R5."

Customer (pie in one hand, pint in the other): "What's the kind word?"

Barman: "Wouldn't eat that pie if I were you."

Last word

 

A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Gian Vincenzo Gravina

GRAHAM LINSCOTT

The Idler, Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The more things change ...

SCIENTISTS at Oxford University have discovered that a video game known as Tetris can be useful in preventing people having psychological flashbacks to distressing episodes in their past.

The psychology department tested a group of people. They were shown distressing videos – horror crashes and so on – then were split into three groups. One played Tetris – which seems to be a game in which you use coloured building blocks on-screen – others played a game called Pub Quiz and the rest were told to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs.

They were also asked to keep a flashback diary for a week.

The Tetris players reported considerably fewer flashbacks than the others, the Pub Quiz people considerably more.

The researchers suggest that Tetris, or a visual-spatial task like it, could be developed as a kind of "cognitive vaccine" against psychological flashbacks. It could become an alternative to current treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Those Oxford psychologists need to extend their research to South Africa, where there's a rich field of flashbacks. At the same time, Tetris needs to be imported in bulk as a matter of urgency.

Every time Glen Aggliotti appears in court charged with all kinds of skullduggery, much of it relating to the former commissioner of police, we get a flashback to when another Aggliotti  was in a monster land scandal in which he was in cahoots with the Nats.

Every time a government functionary fulminates over "fronting" to frustrate the BEE programme, we get a flashback to Nat cabinet ministers going incandescent over "fronting" by whites on behalf of Indian businessmen so they could circumvent the Group Areas Act.

Every time Julius Malema or some other politico cries "Racist!" when the parliamentary opposition dissects government non-performance, we get a flashback to PW Botha crying "Boerehaat!" in precisely the same circumstances.

Every time a black academic insists on the vernacular languages becoming the medium of instruction in universities, we get a flashback to Verwoerd saying the same thing - denying black students exposure to the international mainstream.

Every time the minister of sport, or the parliamentary portfolio committee on sport, express themselves on the racial composition of sports teams, we get a flashback to John Vorster saying virtually the same thing.

Every time a politician tells us of the five million jobs in the pipeline, we get a flashback to successive Nat ministers saying "next year" the "Bantu" will start streaming back to their homelands.

Ensovoorts, ensovoorts. So many flashbacks.

 

Financial turmoil

ALL KINDS of financial turmoil in Europe. Will Ireland have to be bailed out by the EU? When will the Spanish wake up to the fact that they're in a crisis? Are Portugal and Greece still there?

Will the Euro survive as a currency? The stresses are immense. Maybe they'll all go back to their punts, francs, marks, schillings, lira, escudos and so forth.

As we ought to go back to pounds, shillings and pence. It was a far superior currency. When I left school a pint of beer cost 1/6d (15 cents); a cup of coffee cost twopence (2 cents); you could get a mixed grill on the beachfront for 4/6d (45 cents); and you could take a girl out to dinner for a quid.

I rest my case.

Atrocities

THE RHINO poaching atrocities prompt some angry lines from Durban poet Irene Emanuel. She calls her poem The Dark Side:

 

They live on the dark side

where life means money;

riches taken from the

life-blood of fast-fading species.

 

Only on the dark side

are these destroyers found

coiling alongside the devil,

making pacts with murderers.

 

They hack off rhino horns;

shoot tigers for their bones;

torture bears for their bile;

force-feed geese for pate;

rip the fins off sharks;

club seals for their skins;

the list is endless,

the suffering is without merit.

 

They live on the dark side,

the cold hunters who kill

without compunction,

in the name of ostentatious greed.

 

Those soul-less executioners

will take the last rhino,

the last tiger and they will kill

until every last bird, fish,

reptile, butterfly and beast

is wiped off the planet.

And then the dark side

will encompass Earth.

 

Tailpiece

HOW many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?

That's not funny!

Last word

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.

Albert Einstein

GRAHAM LINSCOTT

Captain Cook Friday, November 12, 2010

DEAR me, what is this? The two giant squid in the photograph look vaguely familiar. But why are they holding the World Cup cricket trophy? Oh, I see, it's Morne Morkel and Dale Steyn in scuba gear in the Dubai aquarium. It's one of those set-up pictures. Oh, ha,ha,ha! How very droll!

Yes, our cricketers are in Dubai and today they start their first Test against Pakistan. The silly buggers part – Twenty20 and ODI – is over. Now it's the real thing. The bookies are on their cellphones; the Pakistanis are chained to their beds at night. This is real cricket.

They're going into the Dubai autumn, which means it will be about twice as hot as Durban on a real stinker of a day. Whether Dubai has anything like a Kingsmead green mamba remains to be seen.

I happen to know Dubai reasonably well, and I wish I were there to show the fellows round. There's the Paranormal, a nightclub where the gals are very affable and friendly and say things like: "I ruv you wrong time!"

There's the Vic Bar, very upmarket and a place where a Russian/English phrasebook comes in handy as you make acquaintance of the likes of Olga Svingintitzki, formerly of the Bolshoi Ballet and currently engaged in exotic dancing, US dollars only.

Yes, it's a cosmopolitan place. From the accents about, you could think you're in Sydney, in Glasgow, in Auckland, in Dallas or back in South Africa. In some of the shopping malls there are more kugels per square yard than Sandton. If you're very very lucky, you might even meet an Emirati Arab.

But all this is off-duty territory. The fellows must keep their eye on the ball. We watch with anticipation.

And back to rugby. What a season of superlatives it's been. A Currie Cup competition to top them all; victory for Natal in an epic semi-final and an equally epic final. And then the Boks taking Ireland last Saturday in an absolute cliffhanger where it seemed a shame somebody had to lose.

The Bok performance was flawless and it surprised us all, given injuries, lack of practice together and lack of game time, as well as the disastrous point of departure of the Tri-Nations. The Boks have adapted to the new game, and in a hurry. Piet de Snor has done well.

Patrick Lambie has his Bok cap – the first for Michaelhouse – and I understand there is now a flurry of activity at Durban Girls' College to increase their lead, which now stands only at 2-1 (Springboks Wally Clarkson and Pat Lyster were in the Girls' College kindergarten in the 1920s).

How this will be achieved is not clear, though it is rumoured that Fransie Steyn has been offered a post-matric at Girls' College provided he undergoes a sex change. These private schools stop at nothing.

All eyes on Cardiff tomorrow. Three southern hemisphere teams beat three northern hemisphere last week, none of them by a big margin. A pattern builds up for the World Cup.

See you at The Pub With No Name! This time the gals must remember to wear knickers so we can use the elastic to shoot out the streetlights in the Florida Road feu de joie. Crème de menthe all round! Frappe!

The Idler, Tuesday, November 16, 2010

An ethical question

A NEW TRIBE has been discovered in the Amazon rain forest, a people who have never before had contact with the modern world. They live in the Kugapakori Nahua Nanti reserve, in the south-east of Peru, and have been filmed by an organisation calling itself the National Institute of Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvians (Indepa).

The footage has been shown on television and a small exhibition of the tribes's tools, arrows and handmade pottery, along with skeletons of hunted animals, has been put on display.

The discovery raises all kinds of moral and ethical questions. Should these people – they are not even named in this news report – be allowed to continue their semi-nomadic life in a state of nature? Or should they be dragged into the 21^st century and exposed to the horrors of reality TV, TV-driven professional sport, celebrities and social do-gooders?

Surely they should be left to themselves. Why should they be forced to join a global village that is increasingly ravaged by greed, economic collapse, terrorism, environmental degradation and hideously amplified rock music?

It is an ethical dilemma that should be taken to the United Nations for a resolution that the tribe be left undisturbed; that it should never be forced to take its seat at that body.

The question recalls the lines of Ogden Nash:

In far Tibet
There live a lama,
He got no poppa,
Got no momma,

He got no wife,
He got no chillun,
Got no use
For penicillun,

He got no soap,
He got no opera,
He don't know Irium
From copra,

He got no songs,
He got no banter,
He don't know Hope,
He don't know Cantor,

He got no teeth,
He got no gums,
Don't eat no Spam,
Don't need no Tums.

He love to nick him
When he shave;
He also got
No hair to save.

Got no distinction,
No clear head,
Don't call for Calvert;
Drink milk instead.

He use no lotions
For allurance,
He got no car
And no insurance,

No Alsop warnings,
No Pearson rumor
For this self-centered
Nonconsumer.

Indeed, the
Ignorant Have-Not
Don't even know
What he don't got.

If you will mind
The box-tops, comma,
I think I'll go
And join that lama.

 

Action men

EUROPEAN leaders are cutting a dash these days. Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Russia (the term "European" is used rather loosely) has just topped 150 miles per hour in a Renault racing car on an empty road outside St Petersburg, at one point spinning out but safely correcting.

Recently he was photographed firing harpoons at a whale, while not long before that he took the controls of an aircraft dumping water on a fire in Moscow. He once flew a fighter jet into conflict-ridden Chechnya and he has also been photographed on a Harley-Davidson, riding a horse bare-chested in the mountains and doing the butterfly stroke in a Siberian River.

All this is macho stuff. He will have the red-blooded Rusky lads on his side, probably the lassies as well.

Where do you begin with Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister of Italy? Mistresses, call-girls, prozzies – it never stops. His latest is an under-age girl staying at his pad, to which he responds: "So what? It's better than being gay."

The Italian voters love him. When will Barack Obama start hang-gliding from the Empire States Building? When will David Cameron pose nude on a calendar? When will they learn?

You've got to be attuned to the heartbeat of democracy.

 

Wrinkly rascal

IT'S AN ODD story this about the young Asian man who boarded a flight in Hong Kong wearing a highly realistic latex mask of an very wrinkly old Caucasian man – flat cap, glasses and all. He removed the disguise at some stage during the flight then was arrested when he landed in Vancouver, Canada, after a tip-off by the flight crew.

The authorities are investigating. Some people will do anything to get pensioners' rates.

Tailpiece

AN AUSSIE stockman and his sheila have just got married and found a nice hotel.

The stockman approaches the front desk and asks for a room.

"'We're on our honeymoon and we need a nice room."

The clerk winks. "You want the Bridal?"

"Nah, I reckon not. I'll just hold onto her ears."

Last word

 

I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.

Samuel Goldwyn

GRAHAM LINSCOTT

The Idler, Monday, ovember 15, 2010

Economics and hallucination

COULD there be a link between the discovery of a magic mushrooms processing factory in Pinetown and various public utterances of late?

Magic mushrooms – or "shrooms", as they are known in the trade – have hallucinogenic properties which were popular in the ancient Aztec civilisations of South America, giving a real lift to their ceremonies. They apparently give a good buzz.

And here we have various public figures talking of creating five million new jobs over the next few years, the whole thing driven by a six percent growth rate. This surely is magic mushroom talk.

Will the police investigators make the connection? And who has been responsible for feeding shrooms into the canapés of our leaders? We need to get to the bottom of this. The jungle grew over the Aztec civilisation while they were jigging around and chasing butterflies. We don't want that here.

 

Growing fame

JULIUS Malema's fame continues to grow. A five-minute Juju Friday exercise on Twitter last week apparently made him the second-most tweeted topic worldwide'

He wants to close down Twitter? No, that's crazy. Apart from its being impossible to achieve, the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity.

I've an idea Comrade Julius is well aware of that.

 

Roll of dishonour

MEANWHILE, cads have tried to market on the internet a toilet roll bearing Julius's face on every sheet. This device was first employed in the old Rhodesia after UDI when somebody produced toilet paper with the face of Harold Wilson, the British prime minister.

Such lavatorial humour prompts stern reaction, such as when the editor of a Wits student newspaper was deported to his native Britain for a cartoon which placed prime minister John Vorster inside a toilet bowl.

But they were pre-Twitter days, pre-Twitter tactics..

The genie is out

THOSE seeking to regulate the newspapers and close down the flow of public information might, meanwhile, draw a lesson or two from the Malema/Twitter affair.

The genie is out of the bottle. In the digital age, you can't suppress information. Text and images fly about the world in nano-seconds. Try to control any kind of information and it spreads exponentially.

It's bad news for those who are still psychologically rooted in the Cold War, but that's how it is.

Fridge record

A WOMAN in Oxford, England, is in the news for being the owner of a refrigerator that has served her for 58 years without giving any problem. Retired piano teacher Doris Stogdale first bought the fridge – a General Electric – in Malaya in 1952, and since then it has followed her family round the world and been in almost constant use.

That's quite a record. I myself bought a fridge forty-something years ago and it's also still going strong. A few of us used to camp down at Mbotyi, on the Wild Coast, every Christmas and refrigeration always was a problem.

We would keep our beers in a canvas bag of water slung in a tree and the combination of seepage and evaporation in the breeze would keep them chilled. But nothing else could be kept. Then one year a friend and I bought an old paraffin fridge on an auction sale in Maritzburg. We lugged it down to Mbotyi and set it up in our campsite. It worked like a charm – cold beers, butter, milk, ice, all that kind of thing. That was when we started going soft.

When it came time to leave, we didn't feel like lugging this fridge all the way back so we gave it to one of the cottages at Mbotyi. It's still there today, now converted to gas, and still making ice.

Our fridge was already old when we bought it so it probably beats Mrs Dogdale's for longevity. And I bet it beats hers in the ratio of longevity to capital invested. We bought ours on the auction sale for a pound.

Tailpiece

 

A WOMAN finds her husband stalking about the kitchen with a fly swatter

"What are you doing?"

"Hunting flies."
"Any luck?"

"Yep - three males, two females."

"How can you tell them apart?"

"Three were on a beer can, two were on the phone."

Last word

 

I don't have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They're upstairs in my socks.

Groucho Marx

GRAHAM LINSCOTT,

 

The Idler, Friday, November 12, 2010

It's a whole new vocabulary

"RENTED dog of a political conspiracy … cockroach that has entered the cabinet … bosses who have been the pillar of racist apartheid repression … political toddler … Helen Zille's garden boys …" A shrill new vibrancy has entered our political discourse. Have we heard anything like it before?

 

"Capitalist lackeys … Yankee imperialist running dogs … bean soup tigers …"

 

Yes, it was Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution in China. "A revolution is not a dinner party … All reactionaries are paper tigers … In waking a tiger, use a long stick …" Magnificent stuff!

 

Chairman Julius has added a sparkle to our political vocabulary, a new dimension. He heralds our own cultural revolution. The internet will be a-Twitter with his sayings. Google will leap to bring us his store of profundities. No need for a Little Red Book.

 

Chairman Mao: "People like me sound like a lot of big cannons."

 

Chairman Julius: "Boom-boom!"

 

Roll on the cultural revolution.

 

Naming rights

AN INDIGNANT Johannesburg newspaper columnist complains about the way a woman is expected to take the surname of her husband when she marries. Why should she? She's not his property. She has her own name. This patrilineal thing has no place in today's world.

But then what name should she use? The name she grew up with? (One shrinks from using that frightfully sexist and old-fashioned term "maiden name"). But that name she got from her father. And he got it from his father. The whole thing is patrilineal.

Try going through her mother's line and her pre-marriage name (or maiden name) she got from her father. And he from his father.

The whole thing's still patrilineal, there's no escaping it. Most distressing. Perhaps modern girls, when they marry, should take it all the way back and just call themselves Eve. But then there's all that business about Adam's rib – it's male dominance orientated, the nearest thing to patrilineality.

Distressing indeed. There's no way out. But at least it gives a modern gal a topic for a newspaper column.

 

 

Balgowan High

 

THERE'S much jubilation in Michaelhouse circles at Patrick Lambie's debut as a rugby Springbok, the school's first.

It prompts a reader who calls himself Barrie to ask how, when you're first introduced to a fellow, you're to tell whether he went to Michaelhouse.

No need to worry, says Barrie. If he did, very soon he'll tell you.

 

 

Student protest

A DISTURBING sidelight to this week's massive protest in London against the increase in tuition fees for university students was the crudity and total lack of wit in the placards they were carrying. The vacuity was repeated in many of the impromptu interviews conducted by television reporters.

Students should surely give a better account of themselves than this.

Finance update

 

A FINANCIAL fundi supplies an update on current terminology around the stock exchanges of the world:

·         Bull market - A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.

·         Value investing - The art of buying low and selling lower.

·         P/E ratio - The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.

·         Broker - What my broker has made me.

·         Standard & Poor - Your life in a nutshell.

·         Stock analyst -- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.

·         Stock split - When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.

·         Financial planner - A guy whose phone has been disconnected.

·         Market correction - The day after you buy stocks.

·         Cash flow - The movement your money makes as it disappears down the plughole.

·         Yahoo - What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for R1 500 per share.

·         Profit - An archaic word no longer in use.

 

Tailpiece

A BLOKE walks into a Glasgow library and says to the prim librarian: "Excuse me Miss, dey ye hiv ony books on suicide?" To which she looks at him over the top of her glasses and says: "Git oot! Ye'll no bring it back!"

 

Last word

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.

WC Fields

GRAHAM LINSCOTT

The Idler, Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Has the party line returned?

 

IS TWITTER a modern-day equivalent of the old party line, by which information flashed instantly across entire communities? A blogger named Spyker Koekemoer seems to think so.

 

For the benefit of younger readers, the party line was a telephone system which lasted until relatively recently in some of our rural areas. The Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, Albert Hertzog, refused to upgrade it because he said it was part of Afrikaner tradition.

 

Subscribers were all on the same telephone line. Each had his own call sign consisting of a combination of shorts and longs – a bit like the dots and dashes of morse code – which were produced by cranking a handle attached to your telephone set. Calls from outside came via an exchange, whose operator also cranked out shorts and longs.

 

When your call sign sounded, you lifted the receiver. As the other party began speaking to you, a series of clicks on the line would signify that every tannie in the district was listening in. There were no secrets on the party line. The listeners would sometimes burst in on the conversation, especially if it concerned them.

 

As Spyker Koekemoer ruefully remarks in his blogged letter to an Oom Schalk, of the Marico, he was once discussing the breasts of a certain Sannie Pretorius when she burst in on him with a stream of invective. Even though he eventually married her, she has never forgiven him.

 

Yes, you had to watch your tongue on the party line.

 

Spyker's discussion is prompted by the row between Julius Malema and Twitter over uncomplimentary postings that are appearing on the social network. One tweet noted: "The only struggle Julius ever was involved in was struggling to log on to Twitter."

 

Spyker concludes that this is one thing he and Julius have in common. Neither knows how to log on to Twitter.

 

Make that three, Spyker. I don't know either.

 

Who is this Spyker Koekemoer? Step forward Pat Smythe, Durban raconteur, after-dinner speaker and rugby personality, who specialises these days in recreating the world of Herman Charles Bosman. He's the bogger, I mean the blogger.

 

 

Mampoer

THINKING about it, there was an immediacy and practicality about the party line that Twitter seems to lack. A friend who farmed in the Karkloof was once discussing on the telephone the qualities of the latest distillation of mampoer produced by a recluse who lived in the forest and had an illicit still (He also produced excellent rum and pernod).

Suddenly the local police sergeant was on the line, ordering a case.

 

 

 

Old and new

I WAS privileged to have been involved in what was possibly the first-ever linking-up of microchip technology and the party line.

I was in Fauresmith, a small town in the southern Free State, for a bitterly contested election. I had with me what was then state of the art IT – a portable computer with a keyboard. It was not called a laptop because it was too bulky to use on your lap and it was festooned with wires connecting to this and that. Also, it weighed half a ton compared with today's laptops.

 

But it was portable. And it was a computer. To transmit, you clamped a telephone mouthpiece into a rubber connecting piece and the phone listened to the computer chirpings and sent them on.

 

But Fauresmith was on a party line. I had to arrange with the tannie on the exchange not to interrupt transmission. And the only telephone in the hotel was in the public bar.

 

The kroeg manne were fascinated as I set up the apparatus. I explained to them that I was the local communist agent and had to report to Moscow. They crowded round as I sent my message.

 

With this portable, the message sent would come up on the screen, the words pouring across. Sometimes they were legible, sometimes they would be reversed into mirror-image. It looked a bit like the Russian cyrillic alphabet.

 

"Yislaaik!" exclaimed one of the manne. "Die man is mos 'n Rus!" (Wow! This man's really a Russian).

 

Tailpiece

 

He: "All right, you sexy thing – bedroom now!"

She: "Ooh, you horny hunk!"

He: "No seriously, the rugby's about to start. Get lost!"

 

Last word

Getting caught is the mother of invention.

Robert Byrne

GRAHAM LINSCOTT