Last week Oom Krisjan had a good laugh at the expense of the South African and German navies as they defended an apparently waterlogged Berlin from attack. But this week Johanna Mars from Saldanha e-mailed the oom to let him know that the joke was on him. It seems the war games were focused on defending the Berlin, a high-tech German ship and not in fact a grimy German city. The manne thank Johanna for her vigilance (Vrot Snoek is especially impressed by her surname, which is simultaneously military and reminiscent of chocolate), and consider it a timely reminder to them not to believe a thing they read in Cape Town newspapers.
Here there be morons
Derisive laughter echoed around the Dorsbult bar this week when the manne learned that a Zimbabwean traditional healer conned a businesswoman into hiring mermaids to help her find her stolen car. According to the report, the woman was told to pay $30 000, which would cover the board and lodging of the mermaids at a Harare hotel, generators to illuminate a ”floodlit lakeside ceremony” in which ancestral spirits would tell the mermaids where the car was, and a bull whose severed genitals would point out the thief. (Lemmer can’t help imagining a compass made out of a large polony.) What nonsense, said Visvang Vorster. Everyone knows mermaids can’t stay in hotels: they dehydrate in the air-conditioning, can’t reach the buttons in the lift, and make the linen smell of dodgy haddock.
Happy days
According to Marthinus van Schalkwyk, we are the eighth most optimistic nation in the world. This was the third most arbitrary statement made by the minister in the last year, and came at the 17th most important seminar this week in The Hague, Holland’s third least attractive city and Europe’s second most important exporter of cheese and porn. Maintaining his standing as the ninth most likely politician to cite heartwarming statistics, he said that 80% of South Africans believe in a happy future for the country. This is a 79,8% increase since 1652.
Whitewater scandal?
At a water summit on Monday, Professor Dennis Goldberg said whites didn’t care how much water they waste. But when questioned about this by Beeld later in the day, he changed his tune: it turns out he ”actually” meant to lay the blame on rich people. How nou, Prof? Isn’t that like proclaiming that Jews spread the Plague, and then saying that you actually meant rats? They’re two very different things, but the point stays made.