Remember when they brought out 2 blade razors? That was a stroke of genius. Every man in the world must have tried it, and most stuck with it. Then they brought out 3 blade razors, and some men tried it, but most of us just thought, "come now, that is a bit ridiculous". Recently I was given - wait for it - a 5 blade razor. 5 blades? Really? REALLY? That is like putting 5 sugars into your coffee. Honestly, after the 3rd sugar it doesn't get any sweeter. The only shave that is closer with 5 blades is one with death. Seriously, the thing is as big as my ear. It is not a razor, it is a weapon. You should need a license to use it.
   But what I have always wanted to try is a shave, by another human, with one of those old-fashioned blades - the kind you can get at some barber shops. So today I had one. I'm a bit of a metrosexual: I've had a few manicures and pedicures (awesome, truly) and I had a facial once (didn't get the fuss). So this was in the same genre, just more butch. Because, of course, the risk is greater. You are putting your faith, trust and life in someone else's hands, literally. One little slip of that blade and it's blood squirting all over the place like a Tarantino Special. You have to sit very still. Which I did. And - I'm not just saying this to be macho - I actually wasn't as scared as I thought I might be.
   I also, sadly, wasn't as impressed as I thought I might be. I can appreciate that there is some skill in it, and it did have a kind of old-fashioned romance. But I don't think the shave was any closer than my 5 blade razor gives me, or even closer than my 2 blade razor gives me. I didn't particularly like the feel of the hot towels on my face or the smell of the shaving cream on my skin. I wish I did, but I didn't. I came, I saw, I left. And tomorrow the stubble will be back.
 

...but then who's to say that Danica Camacho wasn't also late? Or early? The chances she was right on time are, well, I don't know what they were mathematically, but it's unlikely she was.
   Danica was born in the Phillipines on October 31st last year, and apparently she was the 7 billionth person on earth. Which, you have to admit, is kind of arbitrary. There are a few hundred babies born every minute on our planet. There are also quite a few people who die every minute. And there are people who live in the Amazon and the Gobi and Outer Mongolia and Outer Outer Greenland who have never been, and will never be, counted by any census. To say Danica was the one is absurd, obviously.
   It's true that the electronic media gives a more realistic version. A quick google search reveals that India have also claimed number 7 billion. As has China. It also reveals that some people think number 7 billion (I would write it out in numbers, but I don't know how many noughts there are) may only be born in April this year. Or may have been born before 31 October 2011. And some even claim that identifying a 7 billionth person was just symbolic. (What? Outrageous!) But I remember watching the news on October 31st, and it was presented as fact. Danica was the one. Which makes the latent conspiracy theorist in me want to come out of the closet. I don't have a good conspiracy theory on it yet, but there must be one. Rupert Murdoch and his allies running the world through propaganda. Or the illuminati. Or something.
   Personally, I feel a bit for Danica. World famous at age 1 minute. Imagine the pressure. The world population is growing, but the only way for Danica to go is down.

 

Pardon the cheesy title. I can't resist a good rhyme. Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the first person (or even the tenth) to use the line. But it's true - I do like Newt.
   It's not him, or his policies. I've never seen him speaking and I don't have much of a clue about what his policies are. No, I like him for other reasons.
   Reason 1: he has a great name. I mean, that name could belong to so many things. Newt Gingrich could be the name of a dog, like Just Nuisance, or a cartoon character, like Pepe le Pew. Or it could be a rat. Or a rock band. Or any number of vegetables. Or a medical condition. If Newt Gingrich were a person, though (which, obviously, he is, but if he were a different Newt Gingrich), he'd probably be a nerd. Newt. That is the name of someone who got teased at school. Someone diminutive and pimply.
   Reason number 2: He just won the South Carolina Republican primary, by quite a long way, which means Mitt Romney may not have the smooth run everyone was expecting a week ago, which will keep things interesting for a while. Okay, it may only be for a week. But I hope it's a while. Because, frankly, I am following this race with unfathomable interest. I say unfathomable because, from here at the bottom of Africa at least, the contest is quite funny in the way it lacks substance. They think they are gunslingers but they are really like children. They say what they think their parents, I mean voters, want to hear. And they call each other names. 
   Which reminds me, isn't Mitt Romney another great name? Not as great as Newt Gingrich, but better than Ron Paul or Rick Perry. I don't get the two first names thing. I'd get confused and call them Paul Ron, or Perry Rick. And then you know how Americans do that thing with the first initial and the last name? So Perry Rick would be P-Rick. I don't think that is befitting of a prez. So if it were about names, which it almost is, Mitt or Newt would have to be the ones.
   I say Newt wins by 12.

 

I was at the licensing department the other day. The one on the Foreshore, that people hate going to, because the queues are always very long and they always move very slowly. For that reason, I got there early. And it was a good thing, because the queue wasn't too long. There was another reason it was a good thing I got there early, but I'm coming to that.
   So there I was with my yellow form, which I had to hand in because I had sold my car and needed to de-register it. (For more back-story, see the post titled "I Know What Smokers Know".) And as I stood in the queue and waited, I beheld what was around me, I thought, "this is a great leveller". In New York, even the mayor takes the train. He sits there with the bums and beggars. This sort of thing - where people from completely different backgrounds, with completely different lifestyles, find themselves occupying the same space for a period of time - still rarely happens in South Africa. It's true that the very rich are unlikely to be at this specific place, because they buy new cars from dealers who do the licensing and de-licensing for them. But in all other ways, the people in the room were very different from each other and were unlikely to find themselves together ordinarily.
   There was something pleasing about this thought, and it made the wait not so unbearable, and it seemed not to take that long for me to get to a window to hand in my yellow form. I smiled at the lady on the other side of the glass and she smiled back. We exchanged helloes. And then our attention was abruptly drawn to a sound coming from behind me. I turned to see a short white man in a large and badly fitting suit at another window talking at a volume that was audible to everyone else in the room. More accurately, at a volume that was hard to ignore. And indeed, everyone else in the room had stopped what they were doing to look at him.
   "Are you telling me I need to go to another office? You must be joking," the man in the bad suit said, loudly. "I haven't got the time for that!" Most people stood still. One or two smiled.
   "Who is going to pay for my time?" the man in the bad suit asked, not at all rhetorically. 
   The lady behind his glass didn't answer him. More people were smiling. One or two were chuckling a little. The man in the bad suit continued to throw his toys. Then he left the window and, grumbling, passed me on his way out, his badly fitting trousers scraping the floor.
   He was the second reason it was good I got there early. If I'd got there later, I'd have missed him. The man who thought he was better than everyone else. While everyone else thought they were better than him.

 
 

 

This is not a post about dogs. It's not about what it was going to be about, either, which was another acronym. An acronym about acronyms. Specifically, Acronyms I Hate Or Love: AIHOLs. 

Okay, I know, it's a cheap shot. It's like putting a girl on the cover of a guys' magazine. Serious editors hate doing it, but the the truth is, it sells magazines. I know, because I know a guy who used to edit a guys' magazine, and he told me that the one month they put a guy on their cover, their sales dropped.

Anyway, in trying to find a pic for this post, the post itself changed form being about acronyms to arseholes. Because when you do a google image search for "asshole" or "arsehole", you don't get arseholes. Not anatomical ones. You get lots of the cheeks, but none of the holes. You also get pics of people who other people think are arseholes. Same with "ass". (No pics of donkeys by the way. Or "btw", as they say in Acronymia. And, btw, "btw" is an acronym I neither hate nor love.) 

I tried "bum" and i got tons of pics of some Asian guy called "Kim Bum". He didn't seem to mind, though. He was smiling in every pic. 

I eventually found these dogs on page 8 of my search for "browneye", in between hundreds of pics of exactly what you would expect to find. Brown eyes.

I'll leave you with a bonus treasure I found in my searches, courtesy of gapingvoid.com

I have never been a smoker. In all my 39.75 years, I have probably smoked a total of between 1 and 2 cigarettes, all in single puffs. I do not enjoy the experience. But that is neither here nor there. What is is that I have long been aware of and curious about a certain code or culture that exists between smokers, and only between smokers. If you're not a smoker, you don't know what smokers know. It's not deliberate exclusion. It's just the way it is.

What I mean is that there are all kinds of signs and ettiquettes between smokers. For example, they can probably tell by the way someone holds a cigarette if he/she is new at smoking, an occasional smoker or an old hand. There are certain ways that men should hold their sticks if they want to appear manly and certain ways women should hold theirs if they want to appear womanly. Then there are the different kinds of smokers, for example, the moochers, who never have their own smokes and "borrow" from others, promising to return the favour but never actually returning the favour. Etcetera etcetera. 

If I ever decided to become a smoker, it would not be for the tobacco, but to know and understand these things more. I suppose there is a little bit of that inherent human need for belonging behind this. And one can find it in many ways. I'm sure body builders have their own kind of knowing. Gamers, too. I once used a word that I thought would grant me acceptance in the gaming world (the word was "nail", as in "I nailed it") but it only showed up my ignorance (the correct word, apparently, is "own", as in "I owned it" - consider yourself warned).

But I think I may be about to legitimately enter and belong to a similar clan. I may buy an Alfa. I went to see one on a whim, and I was in love before I turned the key. In my subsequent weeks of looking at and driving them, I have come to know that if you are not an Alfa lover, you tell jokes like "the best two days of an Alfa owner's life are the day you get the car and the day you sell it", but if you are an Alfa lover, there is an unspoken understanding about the joys of driving them. In my conversations with reluctant Alfa sellers (and they are all reluctant), I have come to know that once you are an Alfa lover, you are always an Alfa lover (even if you have only ever owned one, although that is rare). And I have come to know that there is a knowing but welcoming acknowledgement of newbies like myself, as epitomised by one man's observation: "So this will be your first Alfa." It sounded a bit like I was about to have my first hit of heroin. And I liked it.

They say that people find rational reasons to justify emotional things. So here's my rationale: a pack of smokes costs, what, R35? Times that by 365 and it comes to almost R13 000 a year. Times that by however many years you like. All I'm doing is spending money I saved by not smoking. 

See you on the road.

If you are an avid reader of this blog, then, apart form having my eternal gratitude, you may recall a post about an acronym. (If not, see the entry titled "WAB" from May 12). Today's post is about another acronym. 

You may have guessed by the title of this post, and also by the pictures, that the acronym to which I refer is "WOW". Actually, "WOW" is not a very good acronym, because when you see "WOW" you tend to think it refers to something amazing or cool or at least positive. But "WOW" stands for "Work on Weekends", which is neither amazing nor cool, nor does it have (m)any positives.

I suppose it is a positive if you hate your partner and kids and can't bear to be at home. Then WOW probably is quite handy. Also if your work is your passion - like if you were a pro sportsman - you might not mind. There is one small positive if, like me, you are self-employed, and that is that you can usually charge for your work on weekends. Apparently there are some jobs where even if you are an employee you still get paid overtime. I have some accountant friends and I think they are in this freakish category. And when I say freakish I mean that I am sickeningly jealous, because for 15 years I was a mere employee in the advertising industry, and I worked many weekends, and not once did I get paid for it. In advertising work on weekends, your bosses try to sweeten the deal with some Nando's or pizza for lunch. Or, more deviously and cleverly, you are duped into thinking slavery on weekends - sorry, I mean work on weekends - is a good thing because it will be good for your career, but only if you don't complain and do produce devastatingly good work that will change the world. 

Am I sounding a tad bitter or cynical? Perhaps my bitterness and cynicism (what a great sounding word, by the way - "cynicism" - try say that three times fast) is more about having to work this weekend than a hangover from all those weekends I worked in the past at the hands of my advertising bosses and their clients. Perhaps not.
 

Dallas is back. 

Strues bob.

I am so excited.

I probably won't get to see it, because I don't have DSTV. But I am still excited. Check this out, and you may be excited, too:

http://www.ultimatedallas.com/

What's more, they even have three of the original cast members: Patrick Duffy (Bobby) - now in his early 60s; Larry Hagman (JR) - now in his late 70s; and Linda Gray (Sue Ellen) - I don't know how old she is but check out the trailer. I don't think she's aged one bit since the last show 20 odd years ago. Okay, she looks older than she does in the pic above. But it's mainly her hairstyle that's changed. Those American gals really are amazing. They just don't seem to age. I wonder how they do it?

I do think it's a bit sad for the three of them. Do they need the work? It's a bit like Michael Schumacher. He really didn't need to come back, and now that he has, look what he's done. He's gone and ruined his own legend. 

Having said that, I'm more sad that more of the originals aren't coming back. No Charlene Tilton (Lucy). And especially sad, No Victoria Principal (Pamela). She was a fox of note. Even back then, before I knew what a fox was, she was one. I last saw her do a cameo in an episode of The Practice, and she was still a fox. (By then I knew what a fox was.) I always had a soft spot for her. And her husband (on screen, that is), Bobby. What can I say, I had a soft spot for softies. And Bobby was a softy. He even spoke softly. Whispered, really.

It was the same with Betty and Veronica. I liked Betty. She was a softy.

I wonder what Betty and Veronica would look like now, 25 years later. Obviously they'd look the same, because they're cartoons, and cartoons don't age. But if they did, I wonder what they'd look like. Probably still the same. Because they're American. And you know those American ladies. They just don't age.

I see it has been nearly 4 weeks since my last post.

Oddly, I checked my site traffic and it is not as down as I might have expected. I thought momentum was a big part of blogging. Some of my best friends blog every day. Sometimes several times a day.

I don't know where they find the time. Or the inspiration. Both of which have been in short supply on my side of late. But I know that if one is inspired, one finds the time. Alas, it doesn't work so much the other way round.

Apart from not blogging, I have also been not writing. I have not been not eating, not reading or not exercising. No, it is really only the blogging and writing that I have been not doing.

I am tempted to say that writer's block may be a euphemism for laziness. But actually in fact it is more a kind of floating. Or hovering. It is about directionlessness. A lack of pull. Which is not good in combination with a lack of push.

One can fight it or go with it. I don't know which is better. But I do know this. I have nothing more to write on the matter.

 

I have decided to stop counting my rejection letters. Partly because after 20 it's too depressing, and partly because it's now easier to keep track of the number of publishers I haven't (yet) been rejected by, which are now in the single figures.

To make myself feel better, and to remind myself that I can indeed write, I hereby present for your perusal a previously published short story. It ran in a now-defunct magazine called "Itch", a rather long time ago.

When I was a boy, I used to go into my parents' bathroom in the mornings before school to listen to the 7:30 comedy with my dad while he was shaving. Ja Well No Fine was bloody fantastic, at least to my discerning 10-year old ear. But there was nothing better than the anti-hero, Chicken Man. (Or, as the jingle used to pronounce it, Chickennnn Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.)

This story has nothing at all to do with him.