First the body. Then the arms and legs. Now where's the head?

When I sit back at the end of a working day and think about how the past few hours were spent I realise that my life is bizarre. Blog fodder in fact!
Take today - my first call was to a woman at the Sunnyside police station to follow up on a strange report that came in over the weekend. Some hapless soul strolling through the bush near a small canal on Saturday afternoon came upon a suitcase. Somebody had set fire to it where it had been ditched on canal bank. He went to investigate and found the case contained a woman's torso.
Ah huh! There had been developments, the police woman told me. Yesterday afternoon a tramp had gone rummaging through the dustbins of Sunnyside. And that was when he came across two severed arms and a pair of legs. The cops were informed and detectives seem pretty convinced that the limbs matched with the burnt torso.
Early investigations revealed that there were no missing persons report on file for a woman in Sunnyside. And so emerged the first theory that the victim may have been a "lady of the night" whose disappearance was not yet known or a cause of enough concern to elicit a formal report.
The last big story we had about "ladies of the night" involved hotel rooms, Egyptian soccer players, a questionable theft report that then sparked a bit of an international scandal. But hey - let me not be the one to make random associations.
So I spoke to the investigating officer who confirmed that they have zero leads.
Then I received an e-mail from "The Ministry of Women, Children and Persons with Disabilities" (cannot say I love this lumping together of population groups into a such a lame-sounding category who then appoints a mighty man as their spokesperson - but anyway) who wants to place on record its "grave concern" (swear to God - I could not make that up) with "this gruesome murder and body mutilation".
They made a public appeal for information - both on the murder and the whereabouts of the missing head.
So that was the story. Post mortem tomorrow. I am glad I just get to write the basic story - some other poor soul has to do the actual autopsy. Eeeeew!

Friday at long last!

Friday: my turn to stand in on the newsdesk as the early morning news editor. My chance to be the boss, handle the breaking news stuff and send everybody else running around on stories.
So I did. There was a chopped up body found in Wynberg, the new Gauteng Legislature cabinet was announced, we heard that three armed robbers held up an orphanage in Randburg last night and slapped two of the kids around and bit a social worker on the hand. Then M-Net called a press conference to clarify the colossal stuff up with sms votes on Sunday's Idols final. They'd crowned the wrong winner. Ooops!
The day passed as smoothly as a smooth day possibly can in a newsroom - basically like driving your car minus its tyres over a 4x4 dirt track at 100 k's an hour. It's a bit hairy and uncomfortable, but doable and you get there in the end.
*sigh*
The working week is over.
EvilIncarnate had the day off and I was spared her wicked tauntings about the cane toad plague in Australia, so I had a happy time disappearing mentally into my happy place to think about my pending holiday and the fact that I leave on Wednesday!
But did she leave me alone completely? Of course not!
She did not fail to leave me this lovely image:





I am sure this ongoing harrasment is now bordering on terrorism.
I'm just saying.