Pigs with power

I was pulled over by the Metro police twice yesterday in two separate roadblocks. In the second incident, the cop did not notice – or neglected to mention – the reason the first cop pulled me over.

Sigh. It was not a good day. Nerves are a little shot.

On the up side, both cops did listen to me and were not abusive or corrupt.

Also managed to find a pair of jeans yesterday at a new Meltz. For those not in the know, Meltz is a pretty freakin’ large clothing store that houses everything from the crappest of crap clothing to threads that might actually last a couple of years. I hope my jeans fall into the latter category, but time will tell.

Anyway, brand new store + literally hundreds of people on opening day + *FOUR* bloody changerooms = where was your bloody mind when you planned this shop, Meltz?

Alright, let me go before I bite someone’s head off.

Bon weekend, y’all.

The crazy I don’t wanna be

I used to be afraid that if I didn’t get married and have children, I’d turn into a relative around my mother’s age who wears purple outfits everyday. She wears purple pants, lavender tops, soft mauve jackets. Her nails are painted purple and when she shops for groceries, she uses purple shopping bags – I know because I saw her once in the queue at Woolworths, and I pretended to read the YOU Magazine in order to avoid making eye contact (OK, everything is true in that sentence except the word ‘pretend’)..
Even her home’s walls are apparently painted purple – I’ve fortunately never been invited to see this wonder, so I can’t attest to this but my relatives who have cracked the nod have reported this as fact.

She wears so much purple, I imagine, because people know it as ‘her thing’. I’ll bet she regards herself as a woman who lives her own unique style, and not as the balmy, irritating, know-it-all crackpot she really is.

My fear about turning into this woman should I not ‘live the dream’ of marriage and kids was exacerbated, however, upon meeting a certain woman who helps out at my workplace occasionally in order to make a few bob. She does basic work, such as stuffing the irritating bumf one throws away, into magazines. She was married, and I am unsure if she is divorced or widowed.

Today this woman is wearing a tracksuit that could have been taken from the wardrobe of the cheer-leading coach in ‘Glee‘. Not quite pastel blue, this matching track outfit is eye-catching in the same way a car accident on the side of the road is.

This woman brings her dog with her wherever she goes. When I referred to her ‘hound’ yesterday, she shot me a death glare, saying the dog was her child and not a hound.
Ouch. She’s lucky I didn’t call the dog a rat, which is the animal it most closely resembles.

This woman won’t shop at places that won’t allow her dog in. I imagine all her friends are forced to allow the cur in when this woman comes a-visiting, and that she takes pride, just like Purple P does, in thinking she’s eccentric and interesting for schlepping this mangy beast with her wherever she goes.

*This* is the person I fear becoming.

Ordinary Tuesdays

You know your ordinary days at work, don’t you?
You get to the workplace, wind up the computer, settle down and do a bit of work, push a car up a driveway constructed at a 30 degree gradient, get a cup of tea, carry on working… You know the drill.

User unfriendliness

Much has been said about public toilets, particularly about the trials faced by germophobic women when trying to ensure that nothing they own touches any surface.

This particular bog had me at full stretch when trying to slip my bag on a hook on the back of the door. Although I am a centimetre shorter than my sister (bah!), at a very average height of 1.69m, I fear for the health of the necks around which hand bags will have to be draped instead, by shorter women.

I just wonder what the fuck workmen think when doing something as user-unfriendly as this. Probably, “Where’s my lunch and why do I get paid such a pittance?”

I think there’s a gap in the market for physiotherapists, here. Perhaps I should have written my sister’s number in this loo, though the temptation to say ‘for a good time’ instead of ‘for alleviation of your sore neck’ would just land me in trouble.

Would be damn funny for me, though.

The brilliance of toddlers

I’ve made no secret about my (at best) ambivalence toward, and (at worst) dislike of, children.
They tend to distract their parents from focussing on anything other than what said child is currently eating, excreting and yowling about.

I am a jealous friend and find children the worst kind of foe because they don’t fight fair – chances are their moms, my friends, would leave me hanging on the phone while they make sure their infant doesn’t smear his/her own pooh on the wall.

This masterpiece of a drawing is stuck up on the fridge at my workplace.

What the fuck is this???

No, seriously, doesn’t a drawing have to resemble something, even vaguely, for it to be considered fridge-worthy?

This is the work of a crack addict passing time before his next hit.

The ‘artist’ in question here has no fucking idea she created that piece of crap that adorns her granny’s fridge, and has probably moved on to her ‘eating the crayons straight out of the box’ stage of development.

Just like one throws away/gives away kids’ shoes when they’ve outgrown them, children need to prove they’re able to draw something that has more aesthetic value than black interlocking loops and red scribble before receiving the fridge treatment, and adults need to acknowledge that their children and grandchildren are going to grow up to get Cs or Ds in art class… in this case, an out and out fail.

Children’s grandparents! Bah!

Tuesday rubbish

Here’s the update on my vacuum cleaner as I know all three of you have had nothing else on your mind in the past few days: it appears to still be blowing and not inhaling foul lurgies, much to my disgust.

I don’t understand how it can be broken.Today I resort to percussive maintenance.

Today, also, I received my business cards compliments of my part-time workplace. They are tremendously purple. Mistakenly tremendously purple, apparently.

On Friday, I finally listened a few songs of David Gray’s most recent album. After song one, I thought, "Not bad, quite nice." After song two, I thought, "Perhaps it’s better if I listen to just a couple of songs at a time of his rather than a whole album." I skipped song three halfway through it and metaphorically threw the CD out the window by song four, which sound like gravel being scraped across a yard…tunefully.

His new album ‘Foundling’ is being released this week. Do I even dare? Maybe I’ll just stick to ‘Life in Slow Motion’.

The end of Mary the Cleaner

Mary the Cleaner has left my employ, allegedly for greener pastures – a full-time position with a precarious couple and their +/- six-month-old twins. Personally, I’d rather cover myself with faeces and listen to a smoke alarm for eight solid hours than take this option (hey, that’s kind of what Mary is doing anyway!!), especially considering Mary already had work every day of the week, and her gig with me was effectively half-day with full-day pay, but perhaps the Mare has a fondness for squalling, poohing, demanding infants … multiplied by two.

I have not yet found a replacement for Mary the Cleaner, and thus have been doing a little ‘cleaning’ myself, if by ‘cleaning’ I mean ‘ wiping things with a cloth that probably harbours more germs and lurgies than the surfaces did prior to being wiped ‘clean’.

I’ve also attempted a little pre-spring cleaning, and have so far disposed of a clock which was problematic from day 30, and with which I stupidly persisted for almost three years; a fan which died about a year after I got it after I suspect it was dropped by Mary (though I have no proof for this, and of course I realise I sound entirely like a middle-class madam when I suspect the domestic worker of breakage); a DVD player that was struck by lightning last year; and three chipped mugs.

I’ve yet to get rid of the oil heater that broke three years ago.

Sigh.

So much of breakage.

The worst part of my attempt at cleaning or spring cleaning or not getting engulfed in filth, was attempting to vacuum the disgusting floor-covering in my bedroom, which is closer both in texture and appearance to sandpaper than carpet.

I discovered that the machine was blowing instead of sucking. I thus opened it up only to discover enough dust to have me sneezing until late into the night, despite popping an industrial-grade antihistamine. Just fur and fluff and dust and dirt clogging up this machine’s bag which had very obviously not been changed once since it was purchased last year. Perhaps I shouldn’t have assumed it would have been changed.

I have not checked after cleaning the bag and emptying the vacuum cleaner if it is now, in fact, able to suck. That is a chore for this afternoon.

I am horribly concerned that I may have to leave it outside my front door to be carted away as yet another possession that has bitten the dust (haw haw haw, cough cough) in the past 3.5 years in my flat.

Who needs contents insurance? Nothing lasts in my abode, anyway.

The strange and the immoral

A couple of things have caught my attention on the news wires today.

Remember Paul the clairvoyant calamari, of World Cup football fame? Since his career as a picker of football winners came to an end, he’s been looking for something else to fill his time, and has settled on being an Elvis Presley impersonator.

His agent (yes, Paul has an agent) says Paul has a record deal in placed “for an album called Paul the Octopus Sings Elvis”.

I wouldn’t mind hearing that album. I’d be particularly interested in Paul’s renditions of Fever and Are you lonesome tonight? I am sure they’d be full of feeling and emotion.

I hope the CD will come with a bonus karaoke DVD featuring a montage of Paul’s correct predictions set to his heartwarming tunes.

I do have a question – will Paul be playing his own instruments? I can definitely see him sitting peacefully behind a harp making byoooootiful music.

The other article that made me stop and bang my head on the desk a few times to ease the pain was one informing the world that Nigeria’s government is buying its president, Goodluck Jonathan, not one, not two but THREE new jets, all for him. The cost: US$ 150 million.

This, while his country can’t provide adequate electricity to citizens.

Perhaps this will triple his chances of dying in a plane crash.

One can only hope.

Some stuff

This is my new Jo’burg skyline key holder, hammered into one of my walls with grace and just a bit of excess force. It is a ‘Luv Jozi’ item and when I saw it, I couldn’t resist paying far too much for it and for a soft, warm black hoodie also featuring my city’s skyline.

This is the packaging of THE BEST SHOWER CAP IN THE WORLD!!!!!! It is from Muji in London, very kindly bought for me by the Beagle.

The fact I get to wear a bonnet every night makes me happy. The fact that my hair remains dry makes me happier. The fact that I look like a loser spinster when wearing it makes me less happy. Ah well, whaddayagonnado?

What amuses me is that despite Muji being a Japanese retail company, according to the Interweb, this bonnet of mine was made in China.

And finally, this was a sight encountered at the airport at 7.45 yesterday. This is a woman wearing powder blue, too-tight tracksuit pants and matching Crocs.

Any pants that show butt crack that clearly should be burnt.

Any woman who allows herself to look like that in public, no matter how early it is in the morning, needs to emigrate to a land where a Wallmart is within slithering distance.

Shudder. 

SA musos to offer a presidential candidate in 2014

PRESS RELEASE

6 AUG 2010

SA musos to offer a presidential candidate in 2014

A small group of the cream of South Africa’s musicians met at an unnamed and undisclosed but extremely cool Sandton coffee shop yesterday to discuss the possibility of one of them running for president of the republic in the 2014 elections.

This follows hip-hop star Wyclef Jean’s announcement that he will run for president of Haiti, where he was born.

Jean, who lives in the US, arrived in Haiti yesterday in his private jet and was met by a local urchin choir singing the musician tune, ‘If I was president’, while drumming on coffee tins supplied by actor Sean Penn’s aid mission.

In Sandton, Kahn Morbee from The Parlotones, Ninja and Yo-landi Vi$$er, from Die Antwoord, Gerhard Steyn, of ‘Baby Tjoklits’ fame and Bianca la Grange met to discuss who of them would best represent the interests of the South African public and who would be able to handle the pressures arising from holding the highest office of the land.

Morbee maintained that because his band had played for ANC Youth League president, Julius Malema, at a couple of private occasions, and Malema had asked him for eye make-up tips, Morbee was naturally a leader the South African public could relate to and emulate.

“Fok julle poese,” Yo-landi was heard to mutter, as she left the super-trendy coffee shop, the walls of which featured black-and-white prints of homeless people looking pensive on Camp’s Bay beach.

Steyn treated patrons to an acapella version of his popular ‘tjoklits’ ditty as a waitress brought him a hot chocolate .

Le Grange announced that she knew five languages, including some Russian and a little-known ethnic Inuit language, which would facilitate improved business and trade relations between South Africa and the Baltic region, and with a small, quinoa-harvesting village in the north west of South America.

At this stage, it is speculated that Ninja is the most likely candidate owing to his super-mysterious seeming personality and many tattoos, one of which is rumoured to say, “Nkosi, ons vir jou, fokkity fok”.

The four made a nationwide call for musicians to ‘stand up and be counted as the future politicians of SA’. They’ve affectionately named themselves ‘Musicians for President’ (MUP), or the MUPpets.