I’m walking
This week Lemmer’s 1973 Escort is at the garage, so he’s been enjoying the subtle pleasures of breaking in a new pair of vellies. He was thus unusually affronted by a particularly snooty Arrive Alive radio advertisement that outlined what pests pedestrians are, before admitting grudgingly that ”pedestrians are here to stay”. Oom Krisjan imagines that if Jozi copywriters weren’t so busy paying off their Volvos they might have remembered that pedestrians were here first.
Eek!
On Sunday, as yet another downpour soaked Dorsbult, Dominee Heimwee asked the manne to pray for the farmers in the drought-stricken Visvlaktes (the platteland north of Cape Town). But after reading a Sapa report on Ethiopia this week, Lemmer wonders whether their prayers should rather be directed northward. ”Ethiopia has a massive rural population of 57-million people,” read the piece, ”most of whom eek out an existence as subsistence farmers.” Eek out? At least Cape farmers haven’t started screaming yet.
Just not cricket
The manne became wary of acronyms when the Dorsbult Righteous Order of Love, a short-lived local evangelical group, began advertising themselves as Drol. But even they were suckered by a BBC website headline this week that slotted in just under a headline about the cricket Test in the Caribbean. ”ICC takes on Darfur trials” read the line, launching Dok Rabie on a tirade about the International Cricket Council and its increasing unilateralism; and the manne were just starting to debate the merits of sending Shane Warne to Sudan when the headline was replaced with the more explanatory ”Hague takes on Darfur Trials”. Now to explain to Vroet Snoek that the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction over match-fixing.
Sex whale
They know it’s puerile, but when the manne have put away a few Klippies and Cokes, they can’t resist referring to Tokyo Sexwale as Beijing Pompwalvis. But it seems they’re no longer alone in delighting in the tycoon’s name: a hypnotically animated and scored website (www.hootsmon.com/fergietron/tokyosexwale.swf) confirmed that there are at least two stoned Englishmen who can’t get enough of it. ”There is a man called Tokyo, Tokyo Sexwale,” they sing, ”with the greatest name in history.” And, although they discover his name is pronounced (according to them) ”Seh-kwa-lee”, they promise ”you’ll always be Sex-wale to me”. Those English.
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