We had it coming

FAMOUS editor and journ prof Anton Harber shows he has a knack for satire in his latest blog entry at The Harbinger. Go check it out - it's funny stuff, especially if you've ever written anything speculative about the World Cup being taken away from South Africa and given to Australia...

The Print Media Association - hosts of next month’s massive World Association of Newspaper and World Editors’ Forum Conference in Cape Town - have denied that the global body has Australia on standby to host the meeting if this country is not ready.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

THE GOOD:

• Chippy Shaik is packing for Perth. Poor guy. Half of Europe is investigating dodgy aspects of our arms deal, which he helped negotiate, and it has emerged that his doctoral thesis was, shall we say, not all his own work. Now he feels so hard done by, that his contribution to the struggle is not being given the proper recognition, so he's abandoning ship, as it were. There are several good things about this: Struggle contribution or no struggle contribution, if he can't understand the difference between basic honesty and decency and the absence thereof, we're better off without him. And, if I'm not mistaken, we do have an extradition treaty with Australia.
• The Springboks, in a less-than-perfect display of rugby, demolished England 58-10 in Bloemfontein at the weekend.
• Patricia de Lille is no longer getting the attention she craves over her moronic suggestion that the state regulate the blogging activities of South Africa's citizens. No doubt she fails to appreciate the irony of the fact that "male prostitute" is now one of the most searched phrases in the South African blogosphere.
  

THE BAD:

• It's a tad warmer than it was a week ago, but winter in Joburg continues to get on my tits. It feels as if an icy claw has stretched up from Antarctica and has grabbed me by the testicles. I am filled with dread at the thought of another four months of this.
  
• I continue to be plagued by terminal insomnia. A year without a decent night's sleep can't be healthy.

THE UGLY:

• My band's recording session at the weekend degenerated into a battle of egos. What should have been a pleasant, fun, rewarding and productive experience ended up more a demonstration of what happens when one of a closely knit group of individuals turns out to be an inconsiderate, negative know-it-all. We thought we could do this without falling prey to the politics and infighting that bedevils nearly all bands. We can't.

Neversink, Jim, Neversink

ONE of South Africa's most brilliant musicians and songwriters, my good friend Jim Neversink, fell victim to what can only have been a terrifying armed robbery at his place of work recently.

Now, despite being a supremely talented individual, a fact that has been widely acknowledged by music critics, as well as by his contemporaries in local and international music, Jim is forced to
work as a barman at The Bohemian in Richmond, Johannesburg, to supplement the meagre income he receives for doing something that really deserves rich reward.

It was while tending bar here last Monday, that Jim and his colleagues were held up by two gunmen, while a third stood guard outside. They were forced onto the floor and threatened, before the hoods made off with The Bohemian's cash and staff members' cellphones and other valuables.

I'm not about to use this to launch into the all-too-common rant about excessive crime and the government's apparent inability to do anything about it. The crime rate is what it is, and can benefit from being put into context from time to time, as valuably done in a recent blog entry by Matthew Buckland, who pointed out statistics showing Australia has a much higher rate of burglaries per capita than South Africa, not to mention Dominica, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, New Zealand, the UK, Poland and Canada.

No, a much more important point to make is that there is a superb, original musician out there, who is not receiving the support from the music industry that he deserves. On top of this severe misfortune, he has been illegally relieved of his cellphone and will probably even battle to scrape together the cash to buy a new one.

If you care about any of this but believe there is little you can do to help, you're wrong. All you need to do is head over to The Bohemian tomorrow night (Friday, May 25), pay the 40 bucks required to get in, and settle down for an awesome evening of loserbilly rock 'n roll courtesy of ace singer, guitarist and lap-steel player Jim Neversink.

That's all.


Photo ©JC Katzenellenbogen

Media whore!

PATTY de Lille is a shameless media slut. There's nothing she wouldn't say if she thought saying it would thrust her more forcefully into the public eye and garner her a few extra votes.

Calling for the state regulation of blogs is probably not the most stupid thing she has ever said, but the speed with which she was backtracking yesterday, when she realised South African society was not queueing up to slavishly lick her jackboots in eternal gratitude for saving them from the porn-peddling, libellous hordes, must set a new benchmark for hypocrisy and expedience by a South African politician.

"I don’t and will never stand for censorship," De Lille says, her inane mug staring vacuously from the top of the Independent Democrats' website. And your suggestion that bloggers be restrained from saying what the fuck they like about opportunistic, dishonest scumbag politicians like you and your insipid sidekick, Simon Grindrod, involved what, exactly?

I have met and spoken to this woman on several occasions. She is stupid AND arrogant - a dangerous combination if ever there was one. Fortunately, the only people likely to have taken her comments about blogging seriously are those stupid enough to have voted for her in the first place.

Renalgram for Shaik: Go back to jail

AS SCHABIR Shaik prepared to make a last-ditch effort in the Constitutional Court to stay out of jail for good, rather than back to that cushy hospital where he has spent most of his 15-year sentence so far, prisons minister Ngconde Balfour said in parliament that he was "going back where he belongs" -- prison.

Schabir Shaik

I read this in an article in the M&G Online today and to begin with was rather pleased, and a little surprised, to hear a cabinet minister tell it quite like it is about Shaik. Back where he belongs, indeed. No need to mince our words here, the guy's a malingering sissy. He did the crime, and a particularly sleazy crime it was, but now he doesn't want to do the time.

Then I got to the part in the article, where Mo, one of Shaik's ubiquitous brothers, deplored the heartless and despicably uncaring attitude of the government towards his desperately ailing criminal scumbag brother.

Mo Shaik

He almost had me feeling sorry for poor Schabir, when my eyes lit on a medical term Mo bandied about - renalgram - which, although I've never heard it before, sounds to me like some kind of invasive medical examination related to a kidney ailment.

The unfamiliarity of the word got me thinking: I wouldn't put it past Mo to be talking the biggest load of crap to have ever come out of the mouth of a Shaik sibling as he desperately drums up sympathy for his brother on the eve of a doubly desperate attempt by his brother to get out of jail.


Cat scan

So I googled renalgram, and near fell about laughing when it returned a paltry 133 results. To make sure, I googled a few other common and not-so-common medical tests and procedures - cat scan, autopsy, tracheotomy, brain scan, amputation, arthroscopy,
x-ray, amniocentesis, dialysis, appendectomy, you name it. The number of results ranged from 700,000-odd to 95-million.

133! Ha!

Mo, dude, unless your brother is suffering from a condition so rare that it needs a test or procedure so uncommon that it can muster up only 133 results on Google, in which case I'm very sorry, then you have just been bust talking the biggest load of crap to have ever come out of the mouth of a Shaik sibling desperately drumming up sympathy for his brother on the eve of an inevitably futile attempt to keep him out of jail.

And to make it even more comical, the top Google result for renalgram is not for a medical procedure at all!

It's the name of a newsletter for patients with kidney disease!

Not that that's funny, of course.