Do you know these people?

A friend sent me these today. They cracked me up:







I'll bet Michael Jackson had an easier time at school than Killmequick. And I reckon poor TwoRand has had more than his fair share of jokes about 50 Cent and all that.

Tripping the light fantastic.

My task for today: cover the Eskom announcement of its planned electricity price increases that it will hit us sorry consumers with over the next three years.
Ten minutes later: no, don't cover the Eskom thing. Colleague Breezy has been assigned the story and she will go straight to Megawatt Park from home. As will the photographer who is having car trouble. Again.
A bit later, shortly before the scheduled start of the press briefing: change of plan, again. Yes, cover the briefing. Breezy's stuck in Jozi traffic (like everyone else who uses the roads during peak hour) and so ja, I must haul ass. I head off in a screaming rush, only to meet Breezy on time for the presser and together we sit and wait a good 20 minutes for the start, apparently now working on Africa time.
And then we're off to an extremely uncomfortable start...
A big shot from Eskom began the proceedings by explaining at least three different ways to leave the premises in an emergency. Then he pointed out some Eskom education officers in day-glo yellow jackets who could be followed should there be a sudden need for us to get out in a hurry. It seems the guys there at Eskom are well aware of how unpopular they are!
And do you think they just put their information out there in simple terms for us laymen. And women. Nooooooo! This briefing, supposed to detail the extent of three years of massive power price hikes ahead of us, is has a title.
"Empowering the South African Dream". I swear to God. They truly called it that.
And so began a couple of hours of the most boring rubbish imagineable. Starting with the implementation of the Electricity Act of 1922! I swear, the public has no idea what punishment we journalists endure to get some basic information.
Then time for questions. Not one of the pack of journalists filling the easy-to-evacuate-establishment was successful in getting Eskom CEO Jacob Maroga to answer a question directly. Like his presentation on our 45% increase every year for the next three years (there - said in less than 10 words), his answers would begin somewhere round the turn of the century.
It was a long day!

Drama, drama, drama.

Aaargh! Mondays have to rate overall as the worst day of the week. They are at least twice as long as any other day, and take ten times as much energy to get through.
Today is a case in point. Nothing much was happening on the breaking news front, so I got assigned to follow up the latest incident again bringing to the fore our government’s stance on cops being allowed to shoot dead anyone who so much as looks a little bit bad.
Yesterday our men in blue apparently fired 72 bullets through a 1300 Toyota Conquest. Only it turned out not to be the hijacked car they were chasing. The accidentally nailed an air force pilot who was out and about with three mates. Apparently this was an honest mistake – they had genuinely been tailing a hijacked car that only had a different number plate, different mags and the rear window shot out of it. The tragedy was that they killed an innocent woman, shot her friend in the head and shot another guy through the spine and possibly paralysed him. The pilot driver escaped unscathed.
I tried for ages to track down the pilot without success. So had to transcribe an interview a local radio station got with him. But this was not the correct interview, so I was sent to listen to another radio interview the distraught pilot did with a talkshow host instead. And go much the same information.
All very tragic and sad.
Then off to the new health bar in the canteen for some non-lethal lunch. That was the highlight of the day.
I cannot believe that the Feather Awards, the gay community’s new honour to be bestowed upon icons of South African society, has withdrawn the nomination of ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema in the Drama Queen category.
Apparently Julius was said to have been a little uptight about this and not-so honoured, so his name was withdrawn in order to avoid him throwing hissy fit.
What a pity.
He would have had it in the bag!!

A fall from grace...

So the big news today was the discovery of our neighbouring country's First Lady - or, more accurately, First Shopper Grace Mugabe's dairy empire.
Apparently Grace Mugabe, who took over a bunch of previously white-owned farms a few years ago, built them up into a production house that sells up to a million litres of milk a year to Nestle'.
She was apparently lauded for this achievement and admitted that the farms had been given to her by her husband, and she had since got the whole thing operational. In an "Aw shucks, you guys!" moment, she said she had done it all for dapper Bob, her elderly husband.
Admittedly her set-up is not nearly as productive as the national dairy that got ruined during Zimbabwe's downfall, but hey - the woman has her limits. Last year it was revealed that she flunked out of the University of London where she was enrolled for a Bachelor of Arts in English. Apparently she had managed to pass only two subjects in eight years.
Not one to sit around and get depressed, she simply raided Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank coffers and took her family on holiday to the Middle East after withdrawing R890 000 to fund the excursion. Never mind the crippling food crisis at home!
Sometime after that she made headlines again when she punched a British photographer in the face when he tried to take her picture in Hong Kong.
It seems Grace Mugabe is not a harmless woman.

The style of unpublishable band names.

Friday - the day between a public holiday and a weekend - is bound to be slow in terms of breaking news because there is almost nobody around with most thinking people taking the day off and only sorry souls like myself going into work.
There was not much on the go in terms of breaking news - other than following up on yesterday's plane crash into a school field in Durban. Unbelievable luck that it happened on a public holiday.
Then our boss of newspaper style sent out a new advisory. Last week's announcement was that our newspaper group would use "lemon grass" as the standardised policy for lemongrass across all titles. This caused a storm amongst sub-editors with public discussions across the company e-mail and much complaints that most restaurants and even Woolworths refered to the plant as lemongrass rather than the split word.
This week's announcement? The proliferation of Afrikaans rock bands with unprintable rock names was continuing. Fokofpolisiekar (fuckoffpolicecar) was now joined by vanfokkingtasties (fanfuckingtastic), and apparently both band names have slipped beneath the radar and made it into print without being censored. Even 5fm has apparently taken to bleeping out fantastic's name and referring to the other simply as polisiekar.
So, as from today, our new style in print for these renegade band names will be: vanf***ingtasties and f**ofpolisiekar. Good to know.
Got my curiosity roused. So check out these bad boys! I think they do indeed look fantastic!


Happy weekend everybody!

Battling through the day...

One day before a public holiday - the day was endless.
I battled unsuccessfully to track down a story about two pitbulls that savaged a teenage girl last week. The dogs, I was told, had been removed from their owner by the police and taken to the SPCA. So I called a few branches of the SPCA and a number of policemen, but failed completely in my efforts to find out where the dogs were or what had happened to them.
Then there was an armed robbery at a small shopping centre near Fourways. Yes - yet another hit on a shopping centre in the middle of the day. The cops managed to corner the three guys - shot one dead while the second escaped. The third was either terrified of the shoot-to-kill attitude of the cops and thought he would stay ahead of the game or else he was as depressed by the latest crime stats as the rest of us and so he promptly shot himself dead.
Another day in gangster's paradise.
My colleague The Brat was also battling through the day. She sent me an e-mail entitled "Bored at KFC".
Here you go:

US facilities closed, crime statistics released!

The day started slowly. So slowly, in fact, that we actually called the local news wire service to check that their system was in fact working as not one story, press release, weather report or anything had dropped overnight.
And then it started....
First alert: every United States government facility in this entire country was closed. So I jumped on it, got hold of the press attache and confirmed that yes, indeed, every single consulate, the embassy, mission, US library etc in South Africa was closed. Why??? Because of "information" received by "our regional security office". Groovy story, but above and beyond challenging to pin down.
CutePhotographer rushed out to get a picture of the consulate in Sandton, and nearly got arrested. I phoned numerous mechanical switchboards answered by recordings with American accents. I tried the police, the Ministry of State Security and the National Intelligence Agency. No comment from anyone. I phoned the Association of South African Travel Agents to find out what was happening to the doomed souls whose visa interviews happened to be scheduled for this here day of closure - and they had no information. These appointments are between the traveller and the consulate with no middle man other than a pin number you have to buy from Pick 'n Pay for - get this - US$10 just to contact them for a time to go in and pay a whole lot more for the visa you need to enter the land of the free should you be the holder of one of our green passports.
So ja - smoke and mirrors, bashed something together and got the story into the evening paper. I got an call from someone from the State Security Ministry whe felt sorry for me and said that, in light of the fact that not even Foreign Affairs would say anything, the ministry might just change their mind and call me with a comment. I wait in anxious anticipation....
And then after that the cops released the latest crime stats. They are baaaaad. Really shocking. We are still sitting on 50 murders a day. And house robberies - those hideous stories of gangs who break into homes, tie everyone up and terrify the kids senseless - are up by a whopping 20%.
Ah yes - we South Africans are not likely to sleep peacefully.
Let's see what surprises the stats hold next year after the police minister's enthusiastic encouraging of a shoot-to-kill policy for our men and women in blue.