Lifestyle

Disclaimer: The following piece is not recommended for sensitive readers. It contains strong language, politically incorrect utterances and general profanity. Reader discretion is advised. I have confessed before that I am a walking bundle of personality disorders. One that I failed to mention is that I am fighting a losing battle against anger management. The […]

For the past 10 years I have been trying to read Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before and, although it is not a particularly long book, reading it from cover to cover has been a bitter struggle. First, some context: Eco is my favourite author, regardless of how pretentious that makes me sound. […]

I’m not an Idols fan. The seemingly endless weeks of elimination rounds, public voting frenzy, teary-eyed wannabe pop stars going back home to whatever little dorp they came from … it leaves me cold. However, I must confess to being fascinated by the initial auditions — the ones that are replayed incessantly on the Idols […]

I hate it when “normal” people come up to me and say or do things that suggest that I am, in fact, not fat, that my condition is normal, that I have some mental block that prevents me from completing, or even attempting, the Comrades Marathon. The mere thought of long-distance running brings on heart […]

Among my many personality disorders (incredible arrogance, extreme sarcasm, narcissistic tendencies, shameless self-aggrandisement, compulsive argumentativeness, condescending nature and so forth), the one that worries me the most is what I call my brain-in-mouth disease (BIMD). It’s a pretty serious condition that is caused by the malfunctioning filters between my brain and mouth. That is a […]

I came across this report that tells how police in the United Kingdom have borrowed from their Australian counterparts an ingenious method of managing loitering youths. To fight the growing problem of pimply teenagers gathering in public places with their trousers around their knees, iPods embedded in their waxy ears, composing badly spelled SMSs and […]

Instead of wasting National Braai Day on Wednesday, why not combine it with a psychological evaluation while waiting for the meat to cook? As you may be aware, psychologists employ the “Rorschach inkblot test” to ascertain whether a patient who is otherwise reluctant to open up has some kind of underlying mental disorder. This involves […]

Ever not put an emoticon into a quick SMS, Twitter, IM or email? Ever gotten one that confused the punctuation out of you? The first two emoticons were proposed by Dr Fahlman. He suggested using :-) to indicate jokes, and :-( to indicate serious matters. Of course, we didn’t listen, and we use the latter […]