If you’re thinking about entering a pie-eating contest in the UK, you’d better be sure you’re not on any performance-enhancing drugs.

See, apparently the World Pie Eating Championships in Wigan bans competitors from using gravy as a lubricant, which has led to some competitors using cough medicine to help the pies slide down instead.

The manager of Harry’s bar, which hosts the competition, said this ’secret weapon’ lubricates the throat. Tests have shown that the cough mixture can knock two seconds off the time it takes to eat a championship pie, according to some or other British website.

This year’s winner, Barry Rigby, took 43 seconds to finish his pie. He said he eats about 20 pies a week.

I’ve participated in a number of eating competitions with friends and family before, comprising the following:

-The maximum number of Marie biscuits one can eat without water

-The maximum number of marshmallows one can fit in one’s mouth

-The maximum number of Wick’s bubblegum pieces one can fit in one’s mouth

-The largest spoonful of Tobasco sauce or wasabi one can consume without crying.

The event that ended the ‘how much can you fit in your mouth’ competition was when we moved onto massive serving spoons, and my sister and ex-boyfriend managed to shove a giant trowel  in their gobs.

I knew I was beaten and therefore am now looking for another form of competition which will make me look like I have an IQ of 50.

Any suggestions?

The crap thing about one’s birthday is the number of automated birthday greetings one receives from organisations one has very little interaction with, and whose management wouldn’t recognise you if you ran at them with a stick.

Nothing makes me feel more like a loser than being wished happy birthday by SMS or email by my doctor, insurance brokers and complex’s property managers.

Here are two special messages I’ve received via email over the past couple of weeks, ahead of tomorrow’s marvellous day:

Exhibit A:

Dear DBAWIW

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

*Company I really have dealt with only once, about three years ago* is sending sincerest birthday wishes to *my title, first initial and surname* on 771215

On this special birthday

Many things we wish for you;
May the hours be blessed
With friendships fond and true.

May your dreams all be fulfilled;
You reach your every goal;
And at the ending of the day,
May peace touch your heart and soul.

From the * Company I really have dealt with only once, about three years ago* team.

Exhibit B:

Dear DBAWIW

On behalf of us all at *loyalty club for a book concern which gives you about half a cent for every R3000 spent*, we hope that you will have a great birthday celebration this week. We trust that your next year will be filled with much laughter, and plenty of good times.

Sincerely,

*loyalty club for a book concern which gives you about half a cent for every R3000 spen*

Not even offered a voucher to buy one of their books. Hmph!

Tomorrow I must bring in a cake to work. I’m thinking Marmite-flavoured Swiss roll. Or perhaps I nice Tobasco torte.

It’s been a while since a Russian story appealed to me, and this is certainly a goodie:

MOSCOW MAYOR BLAMES FORECASTERS OVER SNOWFALL

Moscow’s outspoken mayor on Tuesday blamed meteorologists for failing to predict thick snowfall that paralysed the city’s road network this week.

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov is extremely displeased by the work of the Metereological Centre, which couldn’t even give an accurate short-term forecast," his spokesman said Tuesday, the Interfax news agency reported.

Weather forecasts predicted one centimetre (0.4 inches) of snow on Monday evening, but in fact 12 to 15 centimetres (5-6 inches) of snow fell, the spokesman for Luzhkov, Sergei Tsoi, said.

"To err by a factor of 10 is unacceptable," he added.

The snowfall came after a month of abnormally warm temperatures in Moscow. On December 2, the day-time temperature was 8.1 degrees celsius, breaking a record of 7.1 degrees set in 1898 and preventing the brown bears in the city zoo from going into hibernation.

Scrambling to react to the sudden snowfall, the city authorities failed to clear roads promptly and traffic jams on Monday evening stretched over 900 kilometres (559 miles), traffic web sites reported.

"The city services did their job, of course, but such blunders cost a lot and can be the subject of critical analysis at the highest level," Luzhkov’s spokesman said.

In October, Luzhkov caused controversy and amusement when he suggested that planes should be used to seed snow clouds as they approached Moscow and cause the snow to fall outside the city, easing the work of city street cleaners.

I like the idea of punishing weather forecasters. I’d particularly like to punish Simon Gear, whose smarmy manner, irritatingly high-pitched voice and enormous forehead irritates me. For that matter, stock exchange traders and economists should be punished if their predictions regarding the price of gold and oil, and the value of the currency are at all inaccurate.

My proposed punishment schedule would look as follows:

First offence – public acknowledgement that his/her career is based almost entirely on guesswork

Second offence – as for first offence plus donation of section of liver destined for use by former health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

Third offence – as for first and second offences, plus being forced to purchase and listen to “100 hours of the best of Julius Malema’s speeches – the early years”.

Fourth offence – death

For those who elect to skip the punishment for the third offence and proceed directly to death, their last meal will be a Steers toasted cheese and tomato at 23:35, with added heartburn.

It seems residents of Sacriston, County Durham in merry olde England were mightily fed up with the second-rate Christmas tree their council organised for  their viewing pleasure. Thus they were given this tree (see right).

Yes, this was the replacement for the bad tree. The first tree was apparently even worse than this bush enclosed in a frame with sad little lights.

The article on Ananova.com explains that “… when the new tree arrived, it was barely any taller and bore a striking resemblance to the original tree”.

I feel sorry for the stumpy trees. They look very much like what I can get to survive in my pots. Where’s the generosity of spirit the season requests of the God-fearers to love every tree the same, no matter what it looks like? Aren’t mangled, snarly shrubs as worthy of hugs as their tall, slim relatives?

That is a remarkably hilarious photo, though. I’m going to show it to my rose bush as a warning of its future  if it doesn’t stop dying and start blooming.

Right!

End-of-year party time. We’re getting gifts. First aid kits, I believe. Kinda like Orange Rottweiler’s aunt who got her entire office fire extinguishers, as well as her brother (the rottweiler’s father)… three years in a row.

People who never wear dresses are wearing dresses today. It scares me. I’m kitted out in my off the shoulder red denim jeans (see previous post’s comments)

DRINK!!!

To steal a line from one of Ricky Gervais’s characters in Extras, the authors of this study must surely have been having a laugh at the public’s expense when publishing these findings. The latest in ridiculous studies (not of the medical variety) contends that the end-of-year occasion “… is the most important event in the female social calendar, ahead of friends’ weddings, dates and New Years Eve parties.”

This is very obviously the truth. I mean, come on, it sounds right, right? There are, however, some esteemed events even higher up on the totem pole of ‘da best things ta do’ than the office Christmas bash including, but not limited to, the following:

- Cleaning out a seething pile of cat shit from a litter tray

- Giving oneself an enema

- Sniffing the sneakers of a homeless person

- Brushing one’s teeth with a toothbrush that’s fallen into a used toilet … after the user has eaten asparagus.

The study further asserts that on average, women spend 72 hours shopping for an outfit, 96 hours getting in shape, 23 hours beautifying themselves, 63 hours taking advice from friends, 48 hours shopping for accessories and 12 hours on hair styling, including cuts, dying and blow-drying.

How I know that this is not true is because no woman would have any friends left if she spent EIGHT SOLID WORKING DAYS’ worth of time asking her friend about what she should wear and how she should do her hair.

The most obvious flaws of this ‘research’ are that is assumes the following:

-  that people largely like their colleagues so much that they look forward to spending precious non-office time with them while they’re drunk and randy.

- that women prefer being with their colleagues to any other social event.

- that the women surveyed in this study have lives that involve friends and family and travel and movies and dinner and and and. They very obviously do not.

My favourite part of this article is the concluding section entitled ‘Louise Roe’s Christmas Party Style tips’. So let’s see… the aim of the office end-of-year party is to get chatted up by colleagues? Even if you happen to fancy someone at work, is showing your boobs while wearing silly hats (and a red dress, obviously) and quaffing cheap wine really going to amount to anything more than a Christmas Shag in the venue’s bathroom, if you’re lucky?

Well, it’s my office’s end-of-year lunch on Friday and I clearly have wasted precious planning time with regard to my attire. Ok, friends, do your womanly duty (and manly duty – I would never dream of excluding the men who might help me in my goal of kerfuffling in the bathroom with a colleague): should I wear jeans or … jeans? Red jeans? With red lipstick, perhaps? And lots of rouge.

Yeah, I think so!

Driving in South Africa is a particularly alien experience. Traffic laws largely function as ’strong suggestions’, particularly if one happens to be a minibus taxi driver. Gridlock is particularly unpleasant owing to the added threat of people handing out flyers for Prof Wakho, and dodgy fruit sellers at most major intersections. This is Jo’burg (and probably Cape Town and Durban, to a lesser extent).

Yesterday I happened to catch the traffic report on Classic FM at 5pm only to hear that there were major traffic hassles at the “slip and slide intersection” and the “flying saucer intersection”. Yes, I know, I also did a quick calculation and established that it was not 1 April. I suppose it should not be too much of a surprise when one considers that there is a “spaghetti junction” in Durban, but really…flying saucer????!

On a similar note, I know someone who lives in Snelskaats road which, translated from Afrikaans, means speed skating. Looks like those town planners ran out of apartheid-era politicians to thank.

*******

The wonderful and thoughtful Ariel Levy has written an article for The New Yorker on Caster Semenya and the issue of intersex in sport, etc.  I wish I’d known she was in South Africa as recently as a couple of months ago. Please read it for a pretty comprehensive overview of the saga, but also for the depth of feeling the article manages to convey – the closing paragraph just left me bruised.

This Swedish Member of Parliament’s pronouncements on Sweden’s freedom of speech had me guffawing at my computer screen:

Sofia Bothorp, a member of Sweden’s Green Party, has scandalized the nation in the name of freedom of speech. While attending a meeting on what it means to be Swedish, the politician declared that Swedishness includes being able to “lick pussy in the morning and suck cock in the evening if you want to.” She further noted that the tradition of freedom of expression in the Scandinavian country allows her to make jokes about both God’s “impotence” and Allah’s “little dick.”

I’ll say one thing – Parliamentary sessions have never been as interesting in Sweden as they are now.

Today’s the 38th anniversary of the first email ever sent. American scientist Ray Tomlinson apparently kicked of the electronic mail phenomenon by being the first person to send an email from one computer to another.

Thirty-eight years ago.

That astonishes me because the first time I heard about email was, I think, was in 1994, and I only ended up sending an email in 1995 – almost a quarter of a century after it was first conceived. My first email, I believe, was to my friend Wayne who’d emigrated to Australia about a year before, and this sadly ended the handwritten correspondence we had had going.

In commemoration of the date, the Dutch have been encouraged too give up email for 24 hours today, “in a bid to improve efficiency and foster greater personal contact with co-workers”. This is according to Belgian 42-year old Gunnar Michchielsen who contends that email mail disturbs efficiency and disturbs personal contact between colleagues.

Gunner obviously doesn’t know my office, where personal contact between colleagues largely is disturbed in nature, and that the existence of email is what gets me through my work day in tact and leaves me, arguably, no less sane than the previous day.

Without email, I’d be left little choice regarding whether or not to engage with my colleagues’ sarcastic jabs at one another, and with their moments of insanity, inanity and absurdity.

Without email, my friends would not be able to hear about the latest shit going down in my workplace and not be able to reassure me within minutes that it’s them, not me, even when it *is* me.

Without email, I wouldn’t be able to be ridiculously amused by comments attributed to pictures of cats.

Yes, tone is problematic at times in email and meaning is sometimes lost through this medium of communication, but I do not believe for a second that not having email would improve my relationships with my colleagues. So VIVA EMAIL, hail to thee Send/Receive button, you complete me.

Just as well I didn’t rush out and spend the R48.00  I was led to believe I was owed by the S.A. Revenue Service on Friday. This was after using its tax calculator to establish what I owed on my tax, or what was owed to me, when I submitted my tax return.

Having determined that I was owed the princely sum of 4800 South African cents by SARS, I brazenly declared “I’m rich! Drinks on me!”, despite being at my mother’s home at the time where the drinks, therefore, are obviously on her.

Imagine my dismay today when SARS informed me that I, in fact, *owe* R49.77.

The horror.

I’m thinking about taking a second job to cover this exorbitant amount I owe. Thus far I’ve selected five possible positions:

1) Seeker and capturer of garden snails.

2) Door-buzzer presser at a spaza shop.

3) Superglue vendor at the corner of Jan Smuts and Conrad drive.

4) Selector of music for hotel lifts

5) Roller-skating waitron

I gots me some options.