A butchering. A massacre...

After a weekend of the usual murder and mayhem, the 94.7 Cycle Challenge and all the rest, the most talked-about news event we early morning shift workers had to follow-up was the not-so-pleasant rendering of our national anthem at the rugby in France on Friday night.
It was a relatively unknown reggae singer, one Ras Dumisani, who has pulled a stunt that has him rocketed to fame in a Susan Boyle like manner, only for quite the opposite reasons.
At the start of the South Africa vs France rugby match in which our boys lost, the national anthems for both countries were played. There was a 37-piece orchestra for a stirring performance of La Marseillaise. And then Ras and two guys on bongo drums took the stage and massacred, mutilated and finally murdered Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika.
It was not in tune or remotely melodious. In fact some people are describing it as sabotage.
Check it out on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=beg0-kMN3fM

A violent bloody day

A dead child, a shootout in a busy intersection, shattered victims, injured suspects - it all happened today and landed in my shift. This shift turned into one of those nightmare days that had me thinking that while it could make for a pretty good, if somewhat unbelievable fiction story.
Soon after arriving at the office I picked up a strange e-mail from paramedics about a call they'd responded to in Craighall Park where they entered a flat and found a man lying on his bed with a knife in his chest. His four-year-old daughter was found dead beside him.
So off I headed with ChiefPhotographer to the place where it all happened. We spoke to various people and pieced together the scenario: the dad was a friendly guy who often made food which he sold to people in the area and was often seen with his little girl. Last night the mom arrived home and found everything locked, the curtains all closed and nobody answering her calls. She found a groundsman who helped her climb a ladder and break a window to get in and found her child throttled and her husband lying with a knife in his chest.
This morning he was placed under police guard - seems he strangled the child and then attempted suicide. So he's probably going to go down for murder. If his life was bad before, it's about to get worse.
Before we were finished we got another call - a shooting at the intersection of Jan Smuts and Republic in Randburg. So off we went.
Crime scenes in the sun with no shop nearby have to rate as one of my least favourite places to be on a hot day. I get sunburnt, my face goes red and the smell of baking blood makes me gag after a bit. To top it all, our early arrival upset one stroppy little cop who screamed at us as we stood behind his cordons, pointing his finger at us and accusing us of destroying evidence. Truly an annoying character who did not even have a proper gun holster and kept pulling out his handgun and then sticking it back into the side of his pants. He did not look menacing or cool. He did look like an idiot.
Three armed robbers had hit a small business in the area and then caught a taxi. Their victims however, who they'd left tied up, managed to escape and followed them, and set the Metro cops on their tail. As they bounced off in their taxi they realised the cops were onto them and started shooting. The cop got hit in the stomach and fired back, hitting one of the suspects in the leg as the green taxi hit a wall and stopped. The two unhurt guys hightailed it off.
Spectators gathered at the scene and detectives would come and go. There were lights and sirens going. It was chaotic.
And so we waited for the official cop spokeswoman to arrive and give us the official line. During that time the cops managed to catch one of the fugitives and brought him back to where we were, lying him on the ground next to his injured buddy who had fallen asleep on a pillow, arms cuffed behind him with a drip feeding him from where it was hung inside the crashed taxi.
Suspect number two was badly damaged. He was bleeding from the head and hardly conscious. I thought he had been shot and checked this with the cop.
The response: "Um, no. He was running away from us and he fell."
Ja right!

Laugh It Off, Julius and the ultimate t-shirt

So the folks at Laugh It Off, creators of controversial t-shirts that regularly get them in a spot of bother, found themselves deep in the brown stuff this morning. And so I was tasked to write about it.
The team had come up with a new t-shirt design to poke fun at - wait for it - yes - you guessed it - everyone's favourite buffoon - Julius Malema. Only they did it a bit wrong. So the idea, as their man Ruan explained to me, was to highlight the fact the Julius had made some monumentally (aren't they all?) stupid remarks about hermaphrodites during the recent Caster Semenya gender testing debacle. So they took a painting of naked Saartjie Baartman, added a set of manly dangly bits to the crotch area and then posted Julius's smiling face on it. I have to say, it did not make for a pretty t-shirt.
Now, while I understand that the idea behind the design was not intended to offend, the end product was quite awful, and attracted howls of disapproval from all over. Deservedly so. Particularly from their own fans.
I called Julius to get his comment on the matter and find out what he thought about the t-shirt design. He did not pick up and his voice mail told me that his inbox was too full to take anymore messages. So I left a message with sidekick Floyd. They haven't come back to me.
But the guys at Laugh It Off seem to be a bunch of sports. They pulled down the offending image and put a new one up. Still with Julius's head on Saartjie's cropped-off body. Stubborn indeed.
Check this out:

God. And stuff.

It seems that God has been coming in for a bit of media attention of late. First we heard how Simon Mann and his gang were saved from all kinds of disgusting things in Equatorial Guinea. Apparently, they claim, by God and Jacob Zuma. Quite an unlikely team, I would have thought, but effective nonetheless.
It must have been this pairing up with Zuma by God that got the Western Cape leader of the ANC, Membathisi Mdladlana, all fired up and confident, crying out that God will now be judging all journalists who fail to give adequate coverage to the ANC.
How does one define "adequate coverage"?
New party Cope has taken exception to Preacher Mdladlana's brash assertions, claiming in their latest press release to be "tickled pink" .
"We were not aware that Mr Mdladlana had a direct line to God, and spoke on His behalf," the Congress of the People wrote.
"His assertion, however, is rather rich coming from an organisation whose stranglehold on the public broadcaster has seen a blackout on all neutral and positive news relating to COPE and other opposition parties. Perhaps Mr Mdladlana is used to this kind of monopoly over the airwaves given to the ANC by the SABC, so any form of equitable coverage would seem to be biased to him. It also perhaps accounts for his delusions of grandeur."
Jawellnofine.

Keeping condoms in fashion...

Today a press release arrived from the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union. They are planning to host a competition aimed at keeping condoms in fashion.
So the idea is for fashion design students to create garments using condoms.
They sent pictures too.
It's a bit weird for me. I find this stuff a bit icky.

Burnt buildings and that darn sex tape.

Day two after the fire.
The grand old Rissik Street Post Office building was a sad wreck today. Firefighters were still inside her blackened ruins, dousing down hot spots as the sun shone down on them while the pressed metal ceilings lay in rusty piles on the floor.
Layers on the walls show that the ground level was once painted bottle green, rooms on the first floor were chocolate brown and the top floor was a majestic royal blue and beige above the window levels. An angled line of pale triangles down the walls is all that's left of what must once have been a staircase.
It was a devastating sight.
Back at the office I found my colleague Diva hunched up scribbling down as Amor Vitone was giving her exclusive interview to Radio Backverandah. Poor Diva had interviewed scorned husband Joost van der Westhuizen about his admissions regarding his star role in that awkward sex tape.
So he suddenly decided to come clean and, in a "I sort of had sexual relations with that woman" declared what we all knew: that the guy in the dodgy undies snorting drugs and not having sex with a prostitute was not really his doppelganger, and that it was actually him. Up to no good.
This sudden confession was perfectly timed with the release of his book, so the next thing to do was to interview weepy Amor. And she was not going to talk to anyone, until presumably the price was right. And so she sobbed her heart out on radio as Diva took it all down.
"I still love my husband. The fact remains is that those people filmed him with the intention of trying to get some money out of him and that's a crime," she stated in a wobbly voice.
Well, Amor, last I heard, picking up prostitutes and snorting illegal substances hardly fall within the bounds of the law.
I am sure this is a story that is now going to run and run. And Joost and Amor will simply end up richer and higher ranked in the local celebrity stakes. All a bit of a yawn, eh?

Death to the old Post Office building...

Last night the old Rissik Street Post Office burnt down.
This was the big news needing following up this morning, as apparently last night while the grand old building went up in flames, few experts were available to comment.
And at 6am this morning this remained the case. But I gave it my best shot. And it turned out to be one of those hectic situations where people are happy to spout all kinds of information out "off the record", but not so happy to have their names associated with the whole debacle.
First off I got hold of the city's heritage expert. I felt so sorry for him because his absolute sadness at such loss was palpable, he couldn't spout his true opinion, I would imagine, without risking his job as a council employee.
And so I turned to property investors, city developers, architects and heritage site experts. At the same time my colleague Diva was sent back out to the fire site, tasked with tracking down witnesses.
I discovered that while the council owns the building, it has been left derelict for the past 10 years. Since then, enterprising thieves have managed to swipe the hands off the clock and make off with the bell out of the tower. This in itself was no mean feat considering that the bell was a replica of the smallest bell in Big Ben and weighed over 1000kg. And then apart from wooden balustrades, light fittings and switches, thieves also managed to take each one of the cast-iron columns from the building. These columns were apparently about 5-metres high and it would have taken about 20 strong men to shift it, not to mentions trucks and cranes to move them. But our city thieves did indeed manage to do this.
In the meantime several developers have had their offers to refurbish and fix up the old building go ignored. The council apparently commissioned architectural plans of the building for R3.5-million only have the drawings ruled unusable.
The estimated cost of restoring the building before the fire ruined it completely was about R45-million - an amount that was not approved for years. Today the council announced that it will host this year's Miss World pageant in Jozi - at a cost of R49-million.
Diva returned with her insights gleaned from squatters who confirmed that some people had managed to break their way into the old post office, and were living there. They had stolen copper from somewhere and were trying to melt it down when the fire got a bit out of control and they feared being caught and arrested. So they ran away.
And the whole building went up in flames.
Despite it being situated only a few blocks from the inner city fire station.
As one heritage architect put it: it's an unspeakable disgrace.