Eyes wide empty: International newspaper The Onion reports that the torture instruments of Saddam Hussein’s two dead sons, Uday and Qusay, are to be sold at auction in London. It is believed that a bitter ‘inside” fight has taken place between the leading auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christies, for the instruments. The favourite torture instruments are mainly from the personal collection of Uday, regarded as the more depraved of the brothers. The instruments are said to include camel branding irons, a selection of whips and thumbscrews, electrical generators, anal soldering irons, a digital garrotte, genital-crushing clamps, a specially adapted ice-cream scoop for taking out eyes and four-hour non-stop tapes of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Mandela statue to be taller: Unconfirmed reports say that the giant statue of Nelson Mandela planned for the Port Elizabeth harbour is going to be twice as high. The original plans were for a statue a third higher than the Statue of Liberty in New York. However, ANC provincial minister Nonsonga Bheminsangu, in charge of the feasibility study, said this would not be a height appropriate to the international stature of Mandela. ‘You can’t measure Madiba against an abstract concept like liberty. He’s far greater than that.” The estimated cost of the new statue will be in excess of R800-million.
New V-C for Wits? Wits University will soon decide on whether to change its vice-chancellor for a record fifth time in three years. The previous incumbents were dismissed or took voluntary retirement. No reports of incompetence or bad faith have circulated about the current vice-chancellor of Wits, but as a passing law professor, judge and foremost humanist commented: ‘That doesn’t mean we in council couldn’t find something if we really wanted to. Academic spite is one of the hardiest plants on the planet.”
Where there’s a pill, there’s a way: Members of the Department of Health raised their glasses this week to mark the distribution by the department of the first 12 anti-retroviral pills. The recipient, a 32-year-old, 18kg mother of three, received the pills in a typical dispensary plastic envelope, but with a ribbon attached and a greetings card reading ‘Bon Voyage isn’t just a silly thing they write at the end of French letters”. Speaking between gasps for breath, the mother, Elsabie Gaverdam, said the pills might be just in time to save her from the awful death that had taken the rest of her family.
New awards: The ANC has announced a new annual award to be called The Shell House Trophy for Outstanding Racism. A committee will select an independent judging panel that will decide the winners. Cate- gories include Racism in the Print Media; Racism in Sport; Racism in Meteorological Forecasts (for example, black frosts); Racism in the Naming of Domestic Animals and, of course, Subliminal Racism. The names of those being considered as judges are secret, but front-runners are said to include professors Barney Pityana and Jakes Gerwel, Mary Metcalfe, ‘A-Looter-Continua” Mabona, Reverend Frank Chikane and Frene Ginwala. It is rumoured that President Thabo Mbeki was asked to chair the panel, but said his senior moral adviser, John Battersby, had talked him out of it.