So, Riaan Wolmarans, the M&G Online and Thought Leader editor, has finally come up with the goods and managed to get the effervescent human magnet, Ronald Suresh Roberts, to join Thought Leader. What a scoop! And to get Ferial Haffajee to join the fray … well, sheer genius. Who can argue that for the past […]
Ndumiso Ngcobo
Once upon a time, Ndumiso Ngcobo used to be an intelligent, relevant man with a respectable (read: boring-as-crap) job which funded his extensive beer habit.
One day he woke up and discovered that he had lost his mind, quit his well-paying job, penned a collection of hallucinations. A bunch of racist white guys published the collection just to make him look more ridiculous and called it 'Some of my best friends are white'. (Two Dogs, ISBN 978-1-92013-718-2).
Nowadays he spends his days wandering the earth like Kwai Chang Caine, munching locusts, mumbling to himself like John the Baptist and searching for the meaning of life at the bottom of beer mugs.
The racist publishers have reared their ugly heads again and dangled money in his face to pen yet another collection of hallucinations entitled 'Is It Coz 'm Black'.
He will take cash, major credit cards and will perform a strip tease for contributions to his beer fund.
Posted inLifestyle
The Law of Underneath the Furniture
The next time some smarty-pants says: “Numbers don’t lie, you know,” I promise I’ll rip his tongue off its root and make a necktie out of it. And I swear that the next time someone says to me: “Well, your argument falls flat on its nose if you consider the statistical reality,” I’ll grab his […]
Posted inLifestyle
Poll: Who is the idiot?
One of the best books I have ever read in my life is East of Eden by one of my favourite authors of all time, John Steinbeck. I have read the book three times from cover to cover — the first of those times as a wide-eyed, innocent 18-year-old. The book resonated with me on […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Gangster’s paradise in the ANC ahead of Limpopo?
Here we go again with the “political posts”. Blame Thought Leader if you find my “political posts” crappy. You see, I’m much more of a Thought Leader consumer than I am a contributor. Of course, the more astute have already figured out that I never write about politics per se, but rather about some of […]
Posted inLifestyle
Gods with stethoscopes
So I’m walking into a hospital recently when an interesting sign catches my eye: “Designated smoking area”. Nothing out of the ordinary there; I see signs like these everywhere. But of course this is a hospital, a place in which there are rooms filled with people breathing through holes in their necks because their lungs […]
Posted inLifestyle
Bulletin: I saw God on Monday
This revelation occurred to me as I held my newly born son in my arms for the first time on Monday. I closed my eyes and made a serious attempt at convincing myself that I was merely a victim of the serotonins wreaking havoc with the synaptic connections between my neurons, giving me the illusion […]
Posted inLifestyle
Can stupidity lead to the presidency?
Most white South Africans (and a logarithmically growing number of coconuts black people) believe that driving through “shady” places such as Soweto or Hillbrow has a 100% predictable outcome; lying in a pool of one’s blood with a bunch of “locals” performing a wild dance around one’s soon-to-be-corpse. That’s why people talk about “driving into […]
Posted inGeneral
Why do men have nipples? Humour writing — part II
Giving back to society is something to which we all should aspire. This whole “giving back” thing is too often associated with only the rich and famous. That is just plain wrong. Our society cannot afford to wait for Sol Kerzner to throw crumbs our way. We’ve got to grab this bull by the proverbial […]
Posted inLifestyle
The Lotto: Tata-ma-chance, tata-ma-stupid?
According to the SA Fact-a-Day website, about half the people who visited a casino to gamble last year did not have a matric qualification. I guess that this is significant, considering that people without matric outnumber those who have it by quite a margin. I generally discard this type of information into my “useless information” […]
Posted inLifestyle, Sport
What crazy rituals will you be performing come Saturday?
One of my favourite human behavioural idiosyncrasies is the level to which we all delude ourselves about our perceived rationality. Rubbish. Our “rationality” is at the same level as that of poultry. We might not bury our heads in the sand physically, but we sure do it inside our brains. One of the manifestations of […]
Posted inNews/Politics
The joys of opposition politics (part II)
(Disclaimer:Work with me here and pretend that my original piece was called “The joys of opposition politics”. I think it’s a neater, snappier and more sarcastic title than the original.) “DA slams Manto’s Baragwanath visit” screams the headline in the M&G Online. The quintessential spear-chugger rarely ever gets an opportunity to stick his tongue out […]
Posted inLifestyle
Have you hugged a toilet bowl lately?
(Here’s a little something for those suffering from Pikoli exhaustion. Did it ever occur to anyone that one day our national obsession would be a fired chubby guy who may or may not be missing a tooth, to quote a soon-to-be-Schabir’s-best-mate editor, when we risked skin cancer en masse on April 27 1994?) It is […]