Down at the South African Municipal Workers’ Union’s seventh national congress in Pretoria this week, some hard-core communists took great exception to a resolution that suggested building ”self-sufficient” alliance partners. The suspicious and yet earnest unionists asked — did it imply that they turn into ”capitalists” hence the term ”self-sufficient”? The debate raged on for a while until the wary co-proposers of the resolution — the North West province — intervened to reassure that no one expected alliance partners the South African Communist Party or the Congress of South African Trade Unions to take up the road to capitalism and that ”self-sufficient simply meant self-sufficient”.
Heavens above
As if there weren’t enough to worry about in this world, Lemmer read a rather alarming article in Monday’s Guardian. Apparently: ”Astronomers have found that not enough bright young stars are emerging to take the place of the old stars burning out, so, in the ultimate retirement crisis, the cosmos is simply fading away.
”And we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime — by the time our swollen sun is expected to swallow the Earth in the dim and distant future, the light from the stars could be down to around half of what it is now. In time, there will be no stars left shining at all.”
The main source for the story, wonderfully enough, is Professor Alan Heavens from Edinburgh University’s Institute for Astronomy.
But if you still have faith in the universe, you can buy — according to an e-mail received this week — an acre of land on the moon for only $29,99. For this bargain price you get a deed of ownership, mineral rights, a registration package and a map with location by quadrant latitude and longitude. It fails to mention how much it will cost to go visit the prime piece of real estate you have just purchased.
Full circle
Watching TV last week and seeing the police firing at and kicking protesting technikon students reminded the manne of how much and how little has changed.
Shortly after the 1994 elections Oom Krisjan recalls seeing a well-known politician saying ”Never again will our people have to face the police’s bullets” with regards to the rights of the people to protest.
On queue
In Harare, a guy went into a bank and so was frustrated with the long queues that he thought aloud that he was going to kill the president. He went out and two hours later was seen entering the same bank. The same people he had left there recognised him and asked if he had killed the president. To their amazement he answered that the queue to kill the president was even longer than the one at the bank.
Dullah landing
Oom Krisjan knows Dullah’s been under the weather lately, but the headline on a recent press release on the Department of Transport’s website seemed a bit weird. Claiming to be a message from Oom Omar about the Airport Company South Africa’s celebrations, it blared: ”Icasa’s Ten years of Airport Excellence.” Whatever will Ivy say when she finds out Mandla Langa is looking after our airports now?
Addled
Here in the Groot Marico we’re pretty close to Botswana. So it’s with some amusement that we read of the hijinx at Gabz FM radio station recently, where one of the presenters was assaulted by a freelance sub-editor for Business and Financial Times for allegedly failing to air the magazine’s advertisements.
Last week Charles Kidega stormed into the station’s offices and kicked Jacob Kamodi twice in what might politely be referred to as the penalty area. Sensibly, Kamodi fled to get some assistance. According to acting programme manager Kenneth Moeng, Kidega even — rather ominously — ”asked to be shown which car Kamodi drives when he met our promotions coordinator downstairs”.
What makes the situation even more bizarre was that Kidega had not been party to the original trade exchange contract. ”We don’t deal with this man when it comes to commercials, I don’t know why he came into the picture,” said Moeng.
Lemmer has decided to make sure there are no advertisers’ representatives (freelance or otherwise) around when he next shows his face at the Mail & Guardian offices.
Powered up
A few weeks ago a question swept the Web: ”If you were Powergen and were opening an Italian subsidiary, what would you call that company’s website? Oh yes they did … http://www.powergenitalia.com.”
Well, there was so much sniggering that poor old British energy giant Powergen had to make an announcement that it was in no way connected to the website and had no intention of establishing a presence in Italy.
The site belongs, in fact, to an Italian battery manufacturer that was blissfully unaware of what hilarity its domain name would cause among English speakers.
But Lemmer can’t find any such excuse for a United States-based company called Who Represents? — which lets you search for the name of the agent, manager or publicist for any big-name actor — that allowed its URL to be www.whorepresents.com.
Re fund
With South Africans’ personal saving rates among the lowest in the world, it’s no wonder that there’s concern for the future if our population starts to age. But Oom Krisjan remains unconvinced by an advert in last week’s Financial Mail from NBC Retirement Fund. Superimposed on a photo of a young white male are the words: ”I am an African … I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to finds a new home on our native land and whatever their own actions, they remain still a part of me.”
If I writes and spells like that too, can I also be your financial adviser?