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/ 5 February 2005
A few years ago a student of mine handed in a final-year essay containing the words “correlative”, “oeuvre” and “mandate”. Since I knew the author to be an intellectual pimple who considered literature to be the <i>Cosmo</i> horoscope, a quick Google search ensued. There, replicated across half a dozen sites, were the suspiciously erudite paragraphs. I failed it, reported the plagiarist, and forgot all about it. Until, that is, I was summoned to appear before a university tribunal.
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/ 22 January 2005
Perhaps Minister of Sport and Recreation Makhenkesi Stofile is just dumber than a bag full of hammers. But whatever half-formed notions flitted through what we will, for the sake of charity, refer to as the minister’s brain, the result was a prediction that genocide was imminent in South African rugby.
The Cape Town minstrels have a special place in the hearts of Capetonians. I think it is somewhere in the aorta. The doctors say it is too dangerous to operate, so there they stay. They were once called coons, but mercifully the vast lies that are racial stereotyping are a thing of the past. After 10 years of democracy we are free to call the Cape minstrels what they are: tone-deaf sequinned horrors of sartorial ghastliness.
The Sky News “Hijack Live” box was disappointingly immobile. As Rupert Murdoch fed the informational equivalent of white sugar to England’s lowest common denominator on his news channel, the picture-in-a-window resolutely refused to show anything resembling what broadcasters were calling “drama”. After 10 minutes a policeman had walked past, and the rolling billboard behind the bus on the dim Athenian street had changed 10 times.
Zimbabwe will host the 2012 Olympics or die trying. This was the word this week from President Robert Mugabe, as he officially endorsed his country’s bid to host the sporting spectacle.
The Department of Sport and Recreation, in collaboration with a leading pet food manufacturer, has announced that legislation to legalise greyhound racing will be introduced during the next parliamentary session.
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/ 17 December 2004
It’s good to be the king. Not that Ruddy Prince Harry will ever know. The pink Windsor, his regal epidermis eternally flaking off his sun-blasted ears, has to face a life of listless consumption, an endless round of spending and getting and meeting and forgetting. But at least he’s in love, according to the Sunday papers. And then there’s King Mswati, who’s fallen in love at least 11 times.
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/ 3 December 2004
The conversation had turned towards the literary potential of the Garden Route, but despite the Major’s staccato insistences that he had once skimmed a slim volume about a resourceful prostitute with a wooden leg living in Knysna, it was agreed that nothing readable had ever been set in the bosky territory that lay beyond the polo field.
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/ 26 November 2004
I drink Diet Coke. It makes me feel good. It helps me retain my boyish figure. It calms me down. It peps me up. It sings me to sleep at night. I love Diet Coke. I want Diet Coke. I need Diet Coke. Advertising people will say this is because of branding. Breweries, currently shacking up with fellow booze pimp Miller, seemed to have got branding down to a fine art. Until Justin Nurse and Laugh It Off.
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/ 19 November 2004
One would have thought that any society au fait with the physics of suicide bombing would have figured it out long ago: what goes up must come down. Certainly, unshakeable faith in divine providence goes a long way, but prefacing every prediction with “God willing” tends to deny certain realities about the effects on cranial bone of rapidly falling AK-47 bullets. Being faithful is one thing. Being a blithering idiot is quite another.