Work In Digress

And.....Scene Start!

2011-01-09T09:21:00.000+02:00

It's 2011, and it's time to commt myself. To blogging, at the very least if not anything alse!

I'm here, it's now, and you'll have more to read, later, as and when.

Comment Troll, May You Live In Interesting Times!

2010-07-26T08:16:00.000+02:00

Some rice queen is spamming this blog with their Whore-iental effluent, so I've turned off the comments (I think - who knows if the settiings will actually take place?)

To the pus-bucket who visits regularly with their spam: MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES!

"Cul-de-Sac Living Is The Way To Go!"

2010-02-24T17:17:00.001+02:00

So here I am: 35, unmarried - or - pathologicaly single (I'm not so sure it's my choice anymore). I crave the young, new, dynamic, fresh, innovation ; I'm not ready to settle down, get hitched, have kids, conform and grow up.

I've been trying to reconcile all these things as I try find a new home for my corporate family, and then a friend says, simply: "Cul-de-Sac living is the way to go" and I realise...here and now...I've arrived.

And somewhere along the way, my life's flight has been rerouted from 'Fabulous' to ' Normal' and my luggage was sold to pay for the trip.

All I've got is my baggage.

(c) Dave Luis 2010. All Rights Reserved.

What Path Have You Taken?

2010-02-13T01:05:00.000+02:00

Intriguing. Trivial. Sentimental. Check out this link: What Happened in My Birth Year?

Dear Gautengers...

2010-01-06T17:01:00.000+02:00

This was posted on News24, by Blogger Nguruve- how could I NOT respond?

Original article - CLICK HERE

Dear Editor,

Sorry to offend the up-country cousins but I feel I am compelled to send a letter to the visitors from predominantly Gauteng with a few from Mpumulanga thrown in for balance and good measure.

I live on the KZN coast in a relatively small town - a quiet place. That doesn't mean however that I have straw coming out of my ears. Like many of the visiting influx (so they say), I too am a professionally qualified person. I choose however to live where I do.

On each holiday occasion, more so over the year end festive season, we brace ourselves for the invasive batch of ill-mannered, uncouth loud mouths who, for reasons best known to them, insist on leaving whatever scant culture and manners the other side of the Van Reenen's border.

This year end in particular, I have found the visitors to be exceptionally rude, arrogant and generally a total pain in the behind. Serious attitude problems in the shops, extremely discourteous to the shop assistants and business folk of our small abode (no problem at all with using the "F" word at women), 4x4s dumped across two parking demarcations, parking in disabled/elderly zones and when asked to move, a tirade of spoilt brat abuse.

Thanks to one of these magnificent specimens of what makes RSA really proud, a GP caravanning expert succeeded in getting our local mechanic to (voluntarily) stay shut for the entire Christmas/New Year period. The trusty and willing mechanic turned out on Boxing Day to help some "poor and stranded" GP character at the caravan park, spent the next seven hours sorting out the car problem and then when presenting his bill for his efforts, was told that he was an opportunistic little KZN wanker, the bill being tossed into the rubbish bin. This resulted in the guy closing his workshop to all as he couldn't be bothered with being abused.

A few years ago when I was a GP visitor, I thought the KZN coastal residents were being particularly obtuse in their treatment of up-country visitors. Now I know why and I now share the sentiment.

So, GPs and others from up country, if you came to the coast, please endeavour to leave your filthy manners and bad attitudes at home - they are not welcome here.

Carry on the way you do and don't be surprised or hurt when the locals tell you in turn at the end of your holiday "don't come back until at least another 360 days have gone by". Your space is much rather preferred to your car/family/wallet and yourself.

Nguruve

Dear Nguruve,

I hear you. We’re rude, arrogant assholes. And yet, your hovel and all the shitholes where we choose to spend our holidays – and let’s be honest – our cash (which you all prefer to us anyway) are happy to rip us off for dirty accommodation, lousy food and pathetic service.

For one month of the year, the sloths living in your town and others like it, rouse themselves just enough (not enough to provide fast, friendly service, mind!) to become a rabble of thieves, charging exorbitant sums for second-rate gruel and run down slums. You justify your fiscal rape by citing ‘the view’ or some such piffle. As if ‘the view’ leant a hand cooking the meals in your filthy diners! It takes more than that view – pristine though it may be – to distract from your oily gloop and outrageous pricing.

For one month of the year, you rob us blind, thinking we’re stupid enough not to notice. You give us shit service, thinking that like human sheep, we’ll accept it.

For one month of the year we ask you to play host to us – we’ve no problem paying, what’s fair is fair. For one month we ask you not to stagger around stoned, drunk and smelling like the gutter, and slap a smile on your face to show even a slight amount of sincere gratitude for the revenue we generate that, because of your thieving manner of pricing, you’ll be able to live off for the next 11 months.

Well, just as you’ve had enough of us – it’s plain to see that my fellow Gautengers have had enough of you “opportunistic little KZN (and Eastern and Western Cape) wankers” – and that’s why, ol’ buddy-chum that your dingy piscine graveyard suffers the abuse it does.

Of course, you know which side your bread is buttered – otherwise your shunning of our wallets – sorry – of us – would be life-long. But who’s going to pay for your dope and porn mags after 360 days, if we don’t?

I hear you. We’re rude arrogant assholes, and this year, we’ll be staying home – good food at good prices with good service – MAN! What a nice change! As for you and your bumpkin neighbours, don’t come begging – it’s just what we’d expect from opportunistic little KZN wankers!

Your UpCountry Cousin (though I don't recall any of my uncles shagging your mother!)

Dave-enitions Goes Visual!

2009-10-18T20:17:00.000+02:00

I created 'Dave-enitions & Dongles' following a night of heavy medication for some procedure or other. Years back, Don and I used to wrangle word meanings while we explored our own personal infatuations that we were subject to at the time. We still do. Wrangle words, that is.

On the night in question, a side effect of the medication was to set the vocabular part of my brain running at a trillion linguistic tangents at once, and I thought the medley, obscure though it might be to lesser-worded beings, needed publication.

Now a chance thought had me create visual pieces, which I understand will be a boon to the masses who can't quite take in information if there are more than two sentences, and no explanatory diagrams depicting what they have read.

Have I given in to dumbing-down my works for the lowest common denominator? Not as such, I argue - I am just catering for a wider market by offering a better fit to their capabilities.

Check it out at http://daveenitions.blogspot.com/

Pondering.

2009-09-30T19:23:00.000+02:00

If John Simon Ritchie spelled his stage name differently, could his premature demise be headlined "Sid Viscous Comes To A Sticky End"?

Moral Pricing

2009-09-29T07:56:00.000+02:00

Hmmm... on the horns of a moral dilemma.... I oppose, in general, the Mugabes and their shenanigans, and I oppose specifically their homophobic tyranny. I know I SHOULD therefore boycott ALL Nestle products, as the company allegedly purchases tons of dairy directly from Grace(less) Mugabe's "legally" annexed dairy farms. BUT...can I live without Milky Bar and the like? I know deep down EVERYONE has their price and no one ACTUALLY wants to die for a moral standpoint, or principles of freedom (some just do out of sheer bloody mindedness) and therefore on a sliding scale I WILL get my Milky Bar WITHOUT setting off on a guilt trip WHILE STILL making a moral stand and therefore OPPOSING the homophobic tyranny that is Zimbabwe under the Mugabe's rule. I guess the price of my moral absolution is therefore a chocolate bar.

Whine Testing: Wine Notes for Ordinary Mensch

2009-08-13T21:49:00.000+02:00

Jozi, ZA Tuesday 11 August 2009 brought me to my third Dougras Gleen Which Way Trade Show, an annual event I've not missed since being prodigalled back to ZA from Betty II's playground.

Summer Place hosted the event for the second year running and so with intrepid work mates unaware of the trepidity awaiting them, we descended on the scene like haughty vultures with ideas above our station. We were forced to sample wines, champagnes and that revolting rosé nonsense given credence by being produced by a champagne house, Whatsisname Rosé (no need to plug something you're not going to buy anyway, given it's proximity to the millenary price range.

Young Eddie Simes was a last-minute addition but has scored himself a first-rate invite to next year's event by his social disgraces on display that night. They are numerous and contemptible, and the very best of them was his insistence on making notes in the little black books provided for just that very reason by the hosts. I am close to certain Eddie was the only one making notes, and the winemakers and spiritualists* will need their bibulous produce once they read Mr. Simes' thoughts, to whit:

Graham Beck Rosé Brut:- Dry,...horribly sour, miff nose

(at this point Mr. Simes interjected commentary about one of the vini-rep's appeal, but in case the good woman is reading this, we'll leave THAT one out!)

Tall Horse:- CRAP - Not worth tasting

Laurent Perrier Rosé Brut:- again, nose of an old hobo's sock, tasted better than tequila, soda water and piss...but not much.

Buitenverwachting:- Hell noses, was chalky with a hint of berries and shite.

Hemel-en-Aarde Valley:- Pinote noir (SIC) - Meh, very citrus could be cut with pesticides. After taste like sweaty ass of baboon - R400 a bottle.

Paul Sauer:- Light, smooth pale taste, good shit! *On reflection, think it was a mistake, need a takez.**

Dragon's Lair:- Miff nose, smells like fish, ok taste, smooth, chalky as usual.

St. George's:- Miff nose, smells like fish, realise it's my right fucking hand***

Fair Madeira:- Lovely, smooth, should be uber dry and stale with the blend in it.

(another reference to the lass mentioned earlier is made)

Tullibardine:- Still good for a pale single malt, R2-k still steep. This only R500. Feeling my ears are hot, i.e. I could shag a fat chick a.t.m.

Laphroaig:- Quarter cast (SIC) Noooo - Medicine! Smokey, burnt cast (SIC) Fuck me NO, hospital in a bottle.

Laphroaig:- 10 year: Lighter, still medicine single malted MEH.

Jim Beam:- Tastes like watered-down hillbilly piss and shit, But the 8 year old is...un-fucking-believably better than the 17 year old single malts and a kick in the crotch anbd/ or donkey punch.

Maker's Mark:- I'm not sure at this point 10-20 - fuck nose (SIC) how many whiskey, malt, cognac, vodka, tequila...what's the point. It was shite worse the the (SIC) pete (sp?) single malts. Gross I want a bucket.

Glengoyne:- Miff - pete is a cunt.

Grey Goose Vodka:- Wow - faier (SIC) piss in a glass...heaven!

Courvoisier:- Rapper crap. No matter the price tag, you have no talent and drink crap.

Sauza Tequila:- It's Tequila wtf else can it taste like? It was smooth...sewer water frorm (SIC) Satan's arse.

*as in the makers of spirits, not medium-sized hoaxeurs, wot!

** I have no idea what he means, either!

*** we'd sampled some of the smoked salmon and nibbly bits and clearly some of the

insalubrious salmon rubbed off on Eddie's hands!

Simple Simon For The Modern Day

2009-06-07T14:39:00.000+02:00

Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair;
Said Simple Simon to the pieman "Is that organic food you’ve got there? "
Said the pieman to Simple Simon "Finest swine products, free range too"
Said Simple Simon to the pieman "Nay sir – you not heard of swine flu!?"

Kiss This Guy

2009-05-31T20:00:00.000+02:00

A vivid memory of some years back - sitting cogitant in the littlest room (a place where most of my deep thoughts occur*) reading an article about the buzz surrounding Jimi Hendrix's song, 'Purple Haze'. It seems that the line '' 'scuse me while I kiss the sky" was so garbled by Hendrix as he warbled frenetically through the song, that even his most ardent fans heard " 'scuse me while I kiss this guy".

The article went on to say that a website listing a myriad of misheard lyrics was founded and named in honour of this most inauspicious fox puss, Kiss This Guy, dedicated to the millions of fans who happily sing the wrong words to their favourite tunes.

Resplendent on my china throne, in my role as Deep Thought, I smiled, remembering my own lyrical blunder from my clubbing days: It was the mid-90s, I was fresh out the closet and partying up a storm at Steamers, a gay club in the seedy part of Pretoria. Loving the latest belter from The Cranberries, I would belt out the chorus, keeping time with Delores O'Riordan as she vented her vents. I loved that song. Still do.

The lyrical mispront? Driving to 'Varsity with a mate, Gillyfish, and belting out what I thought Delores was singing, when all of a sardine, Gill turns off the radio, failing miserably to conceal his merriment at my misdemeanour, and asks:

"What did you say?" I was confused, as most people are when they think they're merely humming to themselves, and discover all and sundry have been listening in - and asked what he meant.

"What did you sing along to that song?" he almost giggled.

Annoyed, I said simply that I had been singing the words of the song. He should know what I was singing.

" 'Count on me!' Like the song says." I replied and at this point Gill's poor self-control broke and he burst into the most ridiculous guffaws I'd heard in a while.

"It's 'ZOMBIE', idiot! Not 'Count on me!' " he laughed, tears rolling down his face making his driving more reckless than usual.

"It's NOT!" I said, crossly. How could it be 'Zombie' with all those syllables? He was wrong. I was sure of that much, at least. Gill pulled out a CD, shoved it into the Nissan's gaping CD player and hit play. The familiar strains he'd just killed on the radio rang out. We listened intently as Delores cried out to whoever would listen - a fag and a Jew at this point - and as the chorus began I knew Gill was right. It was unmistakeably 'Zombie!' that the inimitable Ms. O'Riordan was saying.

This memory made me smile, as I've said, while I read the Kiss This Guy article. I hadn't smiled when Gill pointed out my gaff, though I should have - he saved me from more embarrassment, I am sure.

But even though I'd been made aware of my untrustable ear, I was unable to stop it raping more lyrics in years to come. A most moving piece at the opening of Sander Kleinenberg's Tel Aviv set moved me. Moveably so. A young waif beseeches the listener to be released from her private hell, and listening to and loving the mournful tones, I was moved to repeat them in front of another mate, Don, who had even less control than did Gill, and mocked me endlessly. In that he still does, about that particular blunder. In fact there were TWO blunders in the opening lines of this piece, such was the way of my musical ear.

What SHOULD have arrived in my brain, if not my soul, as:

"It's quiet now, and as I think my thoughts alone I try to keep my head strong but I think I'm too far gone...slowly sinking down. Down into the darkness - that the lack of will affords!"

My own version ran:

"It's quiet now, and as I think my thoughts along, I try to keep my head strong but I think I'm too far gone...slowly sinking down. Down into the darkness - at the back of Willa Ford's!"

Clearly I am HUGE fodder for a site like Kiss This Guy. My musical tastes mean that often I am listening to words sung by someone so high on drugs or so messed up by life, that sensibility is not among the highest of their priorities - it's all about which words feel right at that point in the track, I am sure.

Take for example, Radiohead's Idioteque, featured on Paul Oakenfold's Perfecto Ibiza album. I only thought yesterday to check out the lyrics online, though I've owned this album for many years. I KNOW I have sung to this in my car, loudly, as I terrorise Gauteng's highway traffic. Thank all attendant deities that I've not had anyone in the car at the time of my dubious crooning - I always thought the lyrics were odd, but having read them online, they're odder than I could possibly have imagined. At first, I thought whoever had committed them to the web suffered the same tin ear I do, and had written down the nonsense they were hearing, and not what the artist was singing. But having read the lyrics as the track plays, it's quite clear they are what they are, and no mistake.

No doubt you'd have to speak to whoever wrote Idioteque's lyrics so that they can explain how they jump from one thought to the next. I suspect very much that they will be unable to - these seem the disjointed gurglings of a serious acid-head on a serious acid trip. For your edification, I have copied them here, courtesy of Sing365.com. See what YOU make of them, written, never mind bawled through car speakers!

Who's in a bunker?
Who's in a bunker?
Women and children first
And the children first
And the children
I'll laugh until my head comes off
I'll swallow till I burst
Until I burst
Until I

Who's in a bunker?
Who's in a bunker?
I have seen too much
You haven't seen enough
You haven't seen it
I'll laugh until my head comes off
Women and children first
And children first
And children

Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time
Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time

Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both
Ice age coming
Ice age coming
Throw them in the fire
Throw them in the fire
Throw them in the

We're not scare mongering
This is really happening
Happening
We're not scare mongering
This is really happening
Happening
Mobiles quirking
Mobiles chirping
Take the money and run
Take the money and run
Take the money

Here I'm allowed (background: and first and the children x6)
Everything all of the time
Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time

Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time
Here I'm allowed
Everything all of the time

deaf and lost are the children (repeated)

*Giving rise to a new word as I penned this blog: bogitant - to have deep thoughts on the loo. Move over Shakespeare, I'm bearing new words at a rate!

Earth Hour Movie - Narrated by Jeremy Piven

2009-03-21T13:07:00.001+02:00

more about "Earth Hour Movie - Narrated by Jeremy...", posted with vodpod

Compelling. True?

2009-03-11T16:38:00.005+02:00

Read an interesting (and beautifully wordy) blog recently that I simply MUST share! Written by Peter Kent, Unspeakable and Incommunicable is a blog for the cerebrants out there - it does not make for light reading at all - but if you're keen on some philosophical meanderings, check it out!

The entry on evil was most thought-provoking: http://lostlaneend.blogspot.com/2009/02/evil-depthless-immitigable-and.html

To Breathe, Or Not To Breathe!

2009-03-11T16:12:00.004+02:00

To breathe , or not to breathe: that is the question:

whether 'tis easier in the wind to suffer

the slings and arrows of outrageous asthma,

Or to take anti-histamines against a lungful of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To choke: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The lung-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to,'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To choke, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep with breath what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause to breathe: there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the shortness of breath of time,

The lung compressor's wrong, the asthmatic's contumely,

The pangs of undrawn breath, nature's delay,

The insolence of exercise and the spurns

That patient merit of the unhealthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a ventolin pump? who would air-tents bear,

To grunt and sweat under a noisome cover,

But that the dread of something like no breath,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those breaths we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus exercise does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of respiration

Is sicklied o'er with the exhaled cast of thought,

And aspiration of great pith and moment

With this regard their breathing turns awry,

And lose the name of action. - Soft breathe you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my breaths remember'd.

with apologies to William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet 3/1)

Selective Suspension of Disbelief

2009-03-02T02:14:00.004+02:00

Thomas used to bemoan my inability to suspend my disbelief. He'd always give me a lecture on the enjoyment of a story being directly related to the reader / listener / watcher's power to involve themselves in the narrative - to believe that what they were seeing was real, irrespective of the obvious flaws in scene.

I cannot accept that in films, for instance, a car that has just lost its headlights crashing into a bus turns a corner and the lights are miraculously whole again. Or that being shot with a tiny handgun rockets a body ten feet in the air. The laws of nature, causality and science are not to be ignored for budget or apathy. It ruins a film for me.

If gravity cannot be overcome in reality, it should not be ignored in a film because it was easier to get the shot that way. But don't get me wrong - if the narrative provides a plausible explanation for why a character seems to float, fly or otherwise finagle the Universe's second most obvious force, then I dive into the story with gusto and accept the falsehood as fact without batting an eye.

Since Thomas attacked my constant pointing out of fallacies in any scene in a movie where they presented themselves to me, I have often wondered if I don't enjoy movies as much as the majority of the populous, who seem to be able to swallow these peculiarities with no more trouble than if proffered with the news that the sun would go down at sunset.

But tonight I had an epiphany while watching James Cameron's 'The Abyss' - the epic submarine sci-fi (by the way - are you too not irked when someone says "sky-fi" instead of pronouncing it correctly as "sigh-fi"?)

In one of the opening scenes, the nuclear sub runs into an abyssal wall and immediately, one of the control consuls explodes in flame, and burns unabated for a significant period of time - indicative of a) a highly sensitive ignition source just beneath the keyboard, and b) a considerable amount of fuel to keep the fire burning. "What UTTER rubbish!" was my initial reaction, sparking as these things always do, a sharp reminder of Thomas' shrill invective against my intransigent imperative to stick to reality. The epiphany came as I suddenly realised that although I demanded truth from such arb things as submarine control consuls and hull thickness, I embraced the ocean floor-dwelling aliens as being as natural as anything.

THAT, my friends, means not only do I have the capacity for willing suspension of disbelief, but because I can turn it off at will, and often do in the insistence of immutable fact, I am able to comprehend better the other-reality that the story-teller presents.

It's Darwin at work here - the evolution of willing suspension of disbelief into something altogether more dynamic and powerful, engaging the imagination as a sixth sense, as tangible and visceral as the others: selective suspension of disbelief, such that it transports the viewer, the watcher from reality to Alternity and transposes his status of inactive passenger in the tale into active participant in a parallel multiverse where EVERYTHING is possible.

I imagine that were I famous author, prolific public commentator or something of the sort, students of literature would in years to come review the film and analyse my thoughts here and pronounce that my selectivity in this case was made all the more possible by the aliens' fluid forms emulating existing deep ocean creatures, right down to their bio-lumenescent radiance. That is partially correct, but seen from the wrong side - that they seem so lifelike does not mean they slip under my reality-checking radar, but rather, right into it, and provide credible simulacrums in a given, defined environment.

No, if there are any distractions to quest for authentic experience, it is that delicious chap who plays the baddie from the military, and who was also Ripley's sidekick in Aliens, Michael Biehn. But even he is not hot enough to sway the jubilation that not only was Thomas wrong, and horribly so, but also I am a canny witness to the modern day story-telling genre, the film.

Long Words Etcetera!

2009-02-06T14:57:00.007+02:00

ONE is a logophile - a lover of words. Unlike the Fairy Godmother (FGM) in that odd film of the late 70s, 'Twice Upon A Time', who hated excess verbiage, I revel in the protracted verbal foreplay that I find myself embroiled in at most points of my day.

That I make a living preferring words for consumption by those who are not gourmands, verbally speaking, as opposed to orally pontificating, is a delectable jewel in my day, as I can at last delight in the challenge of entrancing all in my daily communiqués while at the same time keeping the messgae clear, concise and, dare I say it....free from obscure pollysyllabic terrors!

This gives me a distinct pleasure in being able to toy with the bigger, more cumbersome phrases and words that that fine old dame, the English language, is keeping more and more to herself as the modern world's needs cast aside such gems as she has allowed The Bard and others to lovingly construct for their whimsy.

No, the modern world has no use for things like floccinaucinihilipilification, syzygy and others of it's ilk. I thought I would just display one or two of them here, so that in my own way, I am prolonging their ephemeral existence even for just an instant, and hopefully, spread their usage like fine gold dust over the minds of the lucky few who stumle upon my blog.

For your edification and your glee:

1. Honorificabilitudinitatibus [Hono-rifica-bili-tudi-nita-tibus] is a word used by Costard in act five, scene one of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. It is (in the quotation) the ablative plural of the medieval Latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours." Appearing only once in Shakespeare's works, it is a hapax legomenon.

The word has been used by adherents of the Baconian theory—who believe Shakespeare's plays were written by Francis Bacon—as an anagram for hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin for "these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world".

Parodying this, John Sladek demonstrated in the 1970s that the word could also be anagrammatized as I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch, thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by Ben Jonson. (The two u's, rendered as v's in the original literation, are put together to form - literally - a w, as was common practice in Shakespeare's day.)

The word, however, was used long before Shakespeare used it in Love's Labour's Lost. Honorificabilitudo appears in a Latin charter of 1187, and occurs as honorificabilitudinitas in 1300. Dante cites honorificabilitudinitate as a typical example of a long word in De Vulgari Eloquentia II. vii. It also occurs in The Complaynt of Scotland, and in Marston's Dutch Courtezan (1605).

The earliest use listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1599, by Nashe: "Physitions deafen our eares with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heauenly Panachaea, their soueraign Guiacum."

James Joyce also used this word in his mammoth novel Ulysses, during the Scylla and Charybdis episode when Stephen Dedalus articulates his interpretation of Hamlet.

The cartoon Pinky and the Brain also defined honorificabilitudinitatibus during the credits of the episode "Napoleon Braineparte", in their tradition of defining long, obscure words such as this one.

Similarly, it features in the "Guide to: Sick Days and Spelling Bees" episode of Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide.

Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the longest word in the English language featuring alternating consonants and vowels.

Quotation

"O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.
I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
for thou art not so long by the head as
honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
swallowed than a flap-dragon." - Costard, Love's Labour's Lost, Act V, Scene 1

2. Lopadotemakhoselakhogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiokarabomelitokatakekhymenokikhlepikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptokephalliokigklopeleiolagōiosiraiobaphētraganopterýgōn is a fictional dish mentioned in Aristophanes' comedy Assemblywomen.

It is a transliteration of the Ancient Greek word λοπαδοτεμαχοσελαχογαλεοκρανιολειψανοδριμυποτριμματοσιλφιοκαραβομελιτοκατακεχυμενοκιχλεπικοσσυφοφαττοπεριστεραλεκτρυονοπτοκεφαλλιοκιγκλοπελειολαγῳοσιραιοβαφητραγανοπτερύγων in the Greek alphabet (1169-74). Liddell and Scott translate this as "name of a dish compounded of all kinds of dainties, fish, flesh, fowl, and sauces."

The original Greek spelling had 171 characters (something which is not obvious in the Romantranscription, depending on the variant) and for centuries it was the longest word known.

3. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis ( listen (help·info), also spelled -koniosis) is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a factitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.' A condition meeting the word's definition is normally called silicosis.

It occurs chiefly as an instance of a very long word.^[1] The 45-letter word was coined to serve as the longestEnglish word and is the longest word ever to appear in an English language dictionary. It is listed in the current edition of several dictionaries.

4. Floccinaucinihilipilification ( listen (help·info) American English: listen (help·info)) (or variously floccipaucinihilipilification, as described in You English Words by John Moore) is "the act of describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation".

Origin

With 29 letters and 12 syllables, it is the longest non-technical word in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which presents it as "enumerated in a well-known rule from the Eton Latin Grammar." The OED dates its first use in literature at 1741 in William Shenstone's Works in Prose and Verse: "I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money." In recent years, the word has been used in many scholarly articles in philosophy.

Though the OED gives no specifics on its derivation, the word is said to have been invented as an erudite joke by a student of Eton College, who, upon consulting a Latin textbook, found four ways of saying "don't care" and combined them:

flocci facere (from floccus, -i a wisp or piece of wool)
nauci facere (from naucum, -i a trifle)
nihili facere (from nihilum, -i nothing; something valueless (lit. "not even a thread" from ni+hilum)) Example being: "nihilism"
pili facere (from pilus, -i a hair; a bit or a whit; something small and insignificant)

Usage

It is often spelled with hyphens, and has even spawned the back formations floccinaucical (inconsiderable or trifling) and floccinaucity (the essence or quality of).

Used to minute a decision by Comberton Parish Council (Cambridge, UK) See section 2.3 of Comberton PC Minutes where they had (eventually) decided that land they had just spent ~GBP60K on acquiring was, for the purposes of paying government tax, now of zero value since it was now 'public open space' and couldn't be developed.
Matthew Bellamy in an interview (see here http://youtube.com/watch?v=ymZ7fFropEk&feature=related)
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto uses it on page 59 of his book Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America as an example of his superior intelligence: "they added a dexterous piece of floccinaucinihilipilification."
Episode 73 of Wife Swap (aired 2008-02-28) featured the word. After the "new" mother, Karen Sutton, complains about her host family using too many big words (such as "anonymous"), 16 year old Cassie Myers uses the word as an example of what she considered a "big word."
Sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, the word was used on BBC Radio 4's (then the BBC Home Service) "Round the Horne." The cast were discussing the Flanders and Swann song, "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud;" one member argued that any word could be substituted for 'mud', and Kenneth Horne tried out 'floccinaucinihilipilification'. It didn't work very well.
In the 13th episode of Pinky and the Brain, the word with its definition was mixed in with the rest of the rolling credits.
In an episode^[which?] of the children's TV show Beakman's World, floccinaucinihilipilification was noted as the longest non-technical word in the English language.
In 2005, Paisley Grammar School's Sixth Year wrote, directed and starred in a play which was provisionally titled Floccinaucinihilipilification. It was renamed The Magical Land Of Ruby in November 2005, following the sacking of director Simon Taylor.
Floccinaucinihilipilification is the title of the second of Irish composer David Flynn's Two Nonsense Songs and features the word sung alongside other long words such as antidisestablishmentarianism and Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis [1]
The word was used twice in Rohinton Mistry's book, The Scream.
This word was also used in Robert A. Heinlein's book Number of the Beast.
Stephen Maturin uses it in Patrick O'Brian's book Master and Commander.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal published a comic strip regarding the word [2].

5. Antidisestablishmentarianism (listen to British sample (info), American sample (info)) is a political position that originated in nineteenth-century Britain, where antidisestablishmentarians were opposed to proposals to remove the Church of England's status as the state church of England, forwarded principally by both Payne and Tuffin.

The movement succeeded in predominantly Anglican England, but failed overwhelmingly in Roman Catholic Ireland – where the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871 – and in Wales whose four Church of England dioceses were disestablished in 1920, subsequently becoming the Church in Wales. Antidisestablishmentarian members of the Free Church of Scotland delayed merger with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in a dispute about the position of the Church of Scotland.

The term has largely fallen into disuse; however, the issue itself is still current (see Act of Settlement 1701).

Word length

The word "antidisestablishmentarianism" itself is often referenced in English-speaking popular culture due to its unusual length of 28 letters and 12 syllables. It is commonly believed to be the longest word in the English language, excluding coined and technical terms not found in major dictionaries.

Longer words typically have been coined by specific authors in relatively modern times, or are obscure technical names. For example, floccinaucinihilipilification, first used in prose by William Shenstone in 1741, is 29 letters long, but was thought to have been coined as a nonsense word by a single person or small group of students at Eton. It is rumoured that this was intended to mean "to value something at nothing" or to describe a lack of value. Another word specifically coined to be the 'longest word in the English language' is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the song of the same name in the film Mary Poppins. Chlorofluorocarbonation is also a word that is almost as long as antidisestablishmentarianism, meaning, "the act of putting chlorofluorocarbons into the air."

Recently, the 2007 edition of Guinness Book of World Records listed "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" as the longest word in the English language. The medical term is a lung disease, caused by the "inhalation of very fine silica dust from volcanoes." The disease may make it harder to breathe, and people with it need to be hooked up to a lung machine (an artificial lung). This too was a purposely coined word, with the explicit intent of being a long word.

6. Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (pseudoPHP) is an inherited disorder that is caused by a mutation in the G_αs gene imprinted on the paternal chromosome. As such, a haploinsufficiency results similar to pseudohypoparathyroidism 1A, which is caused by a similar defect on the corresponding maternal chromosome. However, unlike pseudohypoparathyroidism 1A, which presents with all the symptoms of hypoparathyroidism except the low parathyroid hormone levels, pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism presents only with the skeletal defects and none of the defects in calcium and phosphate homeostasis. ^[1] Patients generally have normal calcium and phosphate levels and normal parathyroid hormone levels. As such, it is sometimes considered a variant of Albright hereditary osteodystrophy.^[2]

7. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (pronounced /ˌsuːpɚˌkælɪˌfrædʒəlˌɪstɪkˌɛkspiːˌælɪˈdoʊʃəs/) is an English word in the song with the same title in the musical film Mary Poppins. The song was written by the Sherman Brothers, and sung by Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke. Since Mary Poppins was a period piece set in 1910, period sounding songs were wanted. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious sounds like contemporary music hall songs "Boiled Beef and Carrots" and "Any Old Iron". Based on the word's usage in song form, it can be inferred that it's an adjective, that was created from the words "superb".

8. Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu is the Māori name for a hill, 305 metres (1,000 ft) high, close to Porangahau, south of Waipukurau in southern Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. The name is often shortened to Taumata by the locals for ease of conversation. The New Zealand Geographic Placenames Database, maintained by Land Information New Zealand, records the name as "Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu", a hill at 40.3480 S, 176.5321 E.^[1] It has gained a measure of fame as one of the longest place-names in the world. It is featured in a Mountain Dew jingle and part of it is also in the 1979 single "Lone Ranger" by British band Quantum Jump. It is the subject of a 1960 song by the New Zealand balladeer Peter Cape^[2], as well as Hardcore DJ's Darkraver and DJ Vince in the song 'Thunderground'.

9. Lake Chaubunagungamaug (pronounced /tʃəˌbʌnəˈɡʌŋɡəmɑːɡ/), also known as "Webster Lake", is a lake in the town of Webster, Massachusetts, United States. It is located near the Connecticut border and has a surface area of 1,442 acres (5.83 km²). Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (/ˌleɪk tʃəˈɡɑːɡəɡɑːɡ ˌmænˈtʃɑːɡəɡɑːɡ tʃəˌbʌnəˈɡʌŋɡəmɑːɡ/[1][2]), a 45-letter alternative name for this body of water, is often cited as the longest place name in the United States and one of the longest in the world. Today, "Webster Lake" may be the name most used, but some (including many residents of Webster), take pride in reeling off the longer versions.

10. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (short form Llanfairpwllgwyngyll), also spelled Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and commonly known as Llanfair PG or Llanfairpwll, is a village and community on the island of Anglesey in Wales, situated on the Menai Strait next to the Britannia Bridge and across the strait from Bangor. According to the 2001 census, the population of the community is 3,040,^[1] 76% of whom speak Welsh fluently; the highest percentage of speakers is in the 10–14 age group, where 97.1% are able to speak Welsh.^{[citation needed]} It is the fifth largest settlement on the island by population. Visitors stop at the railway station to be photographed next to the station sign, visit the nearby Visitors' Centre, or have 'passports' stamped at a local shop. Another tourist attraction is the nearby Marquess of Anglesey's Column, which at a height of 27 metres offers views over Anglesey and the Menai Strait. Designed by Thomas Harrison, the monument celebrates the heroism of Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey at the Battle of Waterloo.

11. Muckanaghederdauhaulia (Irish: Muiceanach idir Dhá Sháile) is a village in County Galway, Ireland. The full translation of the Irish is pig-marsh between two seas — or briny inlets, in this instance.

It is a small protrusion of land into Camus Bay (Cuan Chamais) in the Connemara Gaeltacht directly west of Cinn Mhara on the R336 between Camus and An Cheathrú Rua, in County Galway, Ireland. Muckanaghederdauhaulia is believed to be the longest place name in Ireland.

Muckanaghederdauhaulia is one of the ports visited and painted by Bartlebooth in Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec. It is believed to be the longest port name in the world. In the novel, Bartlebooth also visits U, believed to the shortest port name (in the Caroline Islands).

12. Euouae is a mnemonic which was used in medieval music to denote the sequence of tones in the "seculorum Amen" passage of the lesser doxology, Gloria Patri. In plainchant sources, the differentia, that is, the melodic formula to be sung at the end of every line of chanted psalmody, would be written over either the letters EUOUAE, or merely E----E, representing the first and last vowel of "seculorum Amen."

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it is the longest word in the English language which is made up of nothing but vowels; it is also the English word with the most consecutive vowels. It is a useful word for players of Scrabble: though it is made up of six one-point letters, and thus not a high-scoring word, it allows a player to clear a rack of excess vowels without missing a turn to change letters.

13. An isogram (also known as a "nonpattern word") is a logological term for a word or phrase without a repeating letter. It is also used by some to mean a word or phrase in which each letter appears the same number of times, not necessarily just once.

In the book Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities, Dmitri Borgmann tries to find the longest isogrammic word. The longest one he found was "Dermatoglyphics" at 15 letters. He coins several longer hypothetical words, such as "thumbscrew-japingly" (18 letters, defined as "as if mocking a thumbscrew") and, with the "uttermost limit in the way of verbal creativeness", "pubvexingfjord-schmaltzy" (23 letters, defined as "as if in the manner of the extreme sentimentalism generated in some individuals by the sight of a majestic fjord, which sentimentalism is annoying to the clientele of an English inn").

In the book Making the Alphabet Dance, Ross Eckler reports the word "subdermatoglyphic" (17 letters) can be found in Lowell Goldmith's article Chaos: To See a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower. He also found the name "Melvin Schwarzkopf" (17 letters), a man living in Alton, Illinois, and proposed the name "Emily Jung Schwartzkopf" (21 letters). In an elaborate story, Eckler talked about a group of scientists who name the unavoidable urge to speak in pangrams the "Hjelmqvist-Gryb-Zock-Pfund-Wax syndrome".

14. Agglutination is the morphological process of adding affixes to the base of a word. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. These languages are often contrasted with fusional languages and isolating languages. However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in English, which is an isolating language, but has an agglutinated plural marker -(e)s and derived words such as shame·less·ness.

Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, by adding a consonant to the syllable coda as in English tie — ties. Native speakers of strongly agglutinating languages untrained in linguistics cannot usually break down an agglutinated word into its components. Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, too, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage.

The longest German isogram is "Heizölrückstoßabdämpfung" (heating oil recoil dampening) with 24 letters, closely followed by "Boxkampfjuryschützlinge" (box fight jury fosterlings) and "Zwölftonmusikbücherjagd" (twelve-tone music book chase) with 23 letters.

15. One quattuorquinquagintaquadringentillion (represented by a 1 with 1365 zeroes after it), is the natural number between a tresquinquagintaquadringentillion (a 1 with 1362 zeroes after it) and preceding a quinquaquinquagintaquadringentillion (a 1 with 1368 zeroes after it).

Quattuorquinquagintaquadringentillion is recognized as the natural number with the longest name (without use of hyphenatation), and it contains 37 letters.

16.

Deinstitutionalisation (from de-institution-alisation) is the process of replacing long-stay mental institutions with less isolated community mental health services for those diagnosed with mental disorder or developmental disability.

17. AND NOW FOR MY OWN OFFERING, it's my legacy, you see: ALTERNITY: The state or place, to which we retreat each time we utter a wish about ourselves, be it to change our location, situation or happenstance in life, for example merely saying "I wish it was the weekend!" transports you to a time and place you'd rather be - and THAT, my friends, is alternity! YOU READ IT HERE, FIRST!

18. (UPDATED 2009-08-16!) Dave-enition: when you provide a new interpretation (meaningless) for ordinary words in order to define your presence in a specific (and present, but ultimately unclear moment), in other words, by substituting accepted word meanings with new explanatory dongles, that is giving the Dave-enition. It is also mandatory to note that while this is...uh....Dave-enition of Dave-enition, we (that's Don and I) are in no way forced to commit to these dongles nor are we bounden by any obligations. Ergo, without commitment and obligation, Dave-enition is also a synonym for 'relationship'.

Dave-enitions are often presented without the word they are re-defining, and appear almost completely unZenlike as stand-alone questions or statements. It is only once their corresponding word is revealed that Dave-enitions confide their brilliance - for example, the Dave-enition 'lachrymal proclamation with added maternal endearment' is at first utter nonsense, until its coadunation is revealed as 'Chrysanthemum'. The link, tenuous rather than missing, is often an auditory one. Visual coadunations are rare, and therefore bloody good!

The Supreme 'Been: KATE ROBERTS - Hangman Champesse!

2009-02-06T14:13:00.002+02:00

Who'd'a thunk it? I would acknowledge that I am NOT the best! BUT...tis very, very, very true, and needs to be said! I AM NOT THE HANGMAN KING ANYMORE! I defer, adbicate and ACQUIESCE!

And as I step off my long-held throne, I name my truly worthy successor: Young Kate Roberts, who has thwarted my every word, defeats my vocabular vengeance and trounces my brilliantly twisted verbiage!

Not fussed by such horrors as syzygy; pygmy; arhythmically; ziggurat; xylophone and even hymnal, the girl's hangman powers know no bounds!

I genuflect, in Kate's general direction!

Getting Up the Pope's Nose!

2008-12-27T23:02:00.003+02:00

As usual, my reactionary drivel appears belatedly on my blog. There are a number of reasons for that, some more noble than others, such as me allowing some time for my usual hot-headed rancour to cool before passing judgemental comment. Mostly the tardiness of my retort is plain sloth, which is mainly the reason in this case so you will forgive the topical theme to long-time-broken news.

The event to which I am so sluggishly countering, is the Pope’s juxtaposition of homosexuality to the climate, specifically in that he states saving mankind from homosexuality is as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. I’ve had some trouble finding his ACTUAL words, not only because modern journalism seldom finds it necessary to quote, verbatim, the words muttered by some celebrity focal point of the media, but also because I just can’t be bothered to look too hard. You can find references here, here and here, if you’re at all interested, thorough or argumentative.

Years ago I would have launched into a foul-mouthed invective against the pope (does the title require a capital? Take the lack of a capital ‘p’ as you will: disrespect due to his commentary, or poor knowledge of the English tongue), the Catholic Church and organised religion as a whole. That would serve only to add fuel to their brimstone-fed inferno and perhaps prove them marginally correct in a purely semantic sense. That over-reactionary bent of mine has often meant I have enjoyed eating humble pie (neither free-range nor organic) and so I have tempered, for the most part, my fire-and-brimstone rants, if you’ll pardon the beating of the sermon theme to death!

In so doing I often would not respond to things that made me seethe. Friends and family declare this noble, and sensible, disempowering those who at first appeared to have total power over my emotions, control over my sentiments and could, without ever meeting me, ignite fiery and hateful passions deep within me. “Poppycock!” I say! It just means that stupid people were allowed to do and say stupid things, without anyone or anything giving them even the slightest inkling that they may not be as 100%-correct as they first thought themselves to be.

Of course it is arrogance in the extreme to believe that the pope, capital ‘p’ or none, would read my blog, and if he did ‘deign’ to do so, extreme arrogance ad infinitum to hope that he would moderate his comments as a result. I am not stupid. Arrogant maybe, and frivolous and, at times, unfocused, but not stupid enough to believe my verbose reflections, committed to the web as they are, are pontiff-shaking world truths in the least. That doesn’t negate them though, and from such odd and carelessly cast-aside seeds are born the beanstalks of revolutions. Well, I can dream, can’t I?

So these days I tend to react, after a fashion and a delay, with moribund zeal and pointless political correctness sometimes observed. Just to have my say, of course. Because I am like that. With this particular response, I will exercise a little more caution than usual, as one of my fans who often enjoys my blogosphere, is a very religious man, and decent fellow, and a colleague, and a rum chap, wot, and out of respect to him, I will assuage my convention of making sweeping generalisations that perpetuate the tawdriest of stereotypes, and stick to the facts, as I find them, and my opinion, as it is mine alone, and can be dismissed as the ramblings of naïve peasant.

I have waffled now, for 500 words or so, without actually revealing my thoughts on the pope’s commentary. Well, I would like to say that I wouldn’t care to dignify his thoughts on homosexuality with a response, and that spending any time in reflection of his words would be pure wastefulness, but I can’t. Because I have thought about it, a few times, and though my thoughts on religion are not for print, out of respect for the position of the head of a global community I will respond because these thoughts and words of his DO deserve the dignity of my response, trifling though it may be in the grand scheme of things.

Such a sweeping statement made by the head of any organisation or community is reprehensible in its irresponsibility. It lacks insight and its apparent tolerance is merely outmoded social conditioning masquerading as guarded forbearance. Anyone, to whom a significant group of people looks to for example, moral guidance and ethical statutes, has the weighty task of moderating any and all proclamations with insight, tolerance, understanding and a keen realisation of the behaviour and mindset those proclamations will foster. Anything that principal says that sparks a mass action or attitude rebuking any convention defined on race, gender, sexual orientation or age is absolutely off limits!

Public figures so high-ranking may have the intellectual workings to dissect the subtleties, but the masses – the lowest common denominator – by definition, do not have that intellect, and will take as law and out of context, the chieftain’s words literally, and lash out at the subjects of those words. The metaphorical connotations that are the actual intentions of these carelessly-uttered statements are blindly swept over as the attendant mob slavers over the literal tirade it perceives. And if the words are not metaphorical parameters, parables for the modern man, then more so the gross negligence perpetrated by the man in charge.

Of course, I may be selling the masses short here, but in an inescapable generalisation, history, I think, is on my side in proving me correct. A mob is as intelligent as its most vociferous and convincing constituent and they are more often than not the ones who hear half the story, judge harshly and immediately and speak out with extreme prejudice and little forethought for the reaction their words will arouse. I know this because I am often that most vociferous reactionary. Luckily for me, my readers and listeners are few, and in the main, better informed than I am, so riposte in such a manner as to defuse the madness of my vitriol.

In this case, I think my response to the pope is tempered by time and somewhat careful thought, and cognisance of the people reading this and their disposition. There is also the realisation that as apocryphal as his alleged words appear, I can see deep within the twaddle, the core of a thought born of good will and the virtuous intent of the man. He has shown himself, in his lofty position thus far, to be a man who does not think through his words and their consequences clearly. Or perhaps he does not care who he pisses off, and noble though that self-confidence can be, say in business or in sport, it is a poor trait in the pope, in the way it has played itself out to date.

The pope’s words are dismissed easily, because so many have commented on them in the same vein I have, and thus dismissed, I turn to much more important things.

Such as what filling to have on my midnight sandwich.

Pull Yourself Towards Yourself!

2008-11-25T01:47:00.002+02:00

“Pull yourself towards yourself, man!” said Jack – which of course is not his real name – and if you think I’m going to divulge his name here where even B.O. can see it, think again, just not of McCain.

“Pull yourself towards yourself, man!” he said. As a way to completely derail my tumbling and hysterical verbal diarrhoea, it was as effective as, well, halitosis killing a romantic kiss. I stopped speaking. Well, technically, I stopped putting mental effort into articulating the melodrama of my consciousness, but my vocal chords and Good Year-sponsored tongue were dragged on by the sheer oral momentum, and I mumbled erratically for a few moments more, arriving, discoursed, at “Bleeeh!”, much like H.M.Q. did, bumping into the object of her desire while attempting to pull off a suave and chic yet disaffected Obz-ite demeanour just for this very desirable object, anyway!

In fact, it totally expunged the Oscar-winning act I was pulling to present my displeasure, and to this day I cannot tell you what had gotten my goat quite so badly, except to affirm that my goat was gotten gooder than a freshly-ravaged virgin, living smack-bang in the middle of the Viking sailing routes.

So what the hell did Jack mean, “Pull yourself towards yourself”? It makes no sense, grammatically. The reflexive verb has too many subjects, or whatever, that causes Billy Gates’ grammar-checker erupt in a flurry of green squiggles.

“Pull yourself towards yourself!”

Said as something to verbally slap a hysterical bawd it is mightily effective. I think I have just found out why. If Jack had simply slapped me unsilly, it would not have been an event to write home about. Unless I was now dictating some droll Hallmark Channel-esque dramatisation of life as a battered wife for a third-rate tabloid rag. Which I wasn’t. Had he simply barked “Shut it!” I’d have glared at him – icily, of course – and raged on, unabated. Shooting me would just have been overkill, and the melodrama would have inhumed his very existence as the local constabulary would naturally be imbued with a sense of accountability for my non-existentialist palaver.

So as a replete method to cease my nonsense without inviting unwonted consequence, it was better than everything, and lacked for nothing.
“Pull yourself towards yourself!”

Damn fine way to end a hormonal frenzy, I think.

Now, I know you must be frothing at the bit to have read all the way to this point and have no concrete definition of this oddly-turned phrase. We both know it’s going to gnaw at your sanity and composure until you have resolved that it is either meaningless, thereby confirming your astute intelligence, or that it is a quip of particular insightful note, thusly rendering your extelligence cutting-edge, and totally oozing with fashionable argot-of-the-moment, and if you don’t come to either conclusion, PDQ, you are going to rumble off into a foolish insensibility, incapable of making up your own mind. And THAT is the worst thing that can happen, right?

Well, dear.

Pull yourself towards yourself, dammit!

Confessions of a Beater

2008-11-16T18:45:00.004+02:00

I’d like to tell you about my childhood, about a time of innocence and purity, when my very existence didn’t bring fear and hatred in equal amounts. I can’t. I don’t remember that time, not even a fuzzy recollection of that time. Think my mother hated me, think my father beat me and I want revenge for that? You know the answer, man? This urge to beat is …it’s like my first memory, my first fully formed thought. It’s like I was born like this, came into the world with the evil and the badness and the violence inherent already there, on the surface, looking for my first hit.

How can this be? How does such malevolence awaken in the womb? You can ask these – I did – I have. I still do. Want the answer? I don’t know. I just don’t know. It makes no sense, and you can spin either side of the ‘nature vs. nurture’ argument as much as you like. It still doesn’t convince me or answer all the questions or the realities or the truths that need answering, but I tell you, I think…no…I know I was…born to beat them, to hit them, to hurt them…break them until they lie, unrecognisable, in a congealing pool of their own innards. I …have been told it’s….wrong…to feel this way, that it’s evil. But how can this feeling be wrong? It is what drives me, it keeps me alive, it is what defines me. It’s who I am. Form and function, form and function – there’s beauty in that. There’s beauty in me. I am what I do and what I do is what I am…hell…am I channelling Dr. Seuss here? Ha!

How many times have I lost control and beaten one? How many have I beaten to a pulp? How many injuries – how many have…not made it. I do not know. It’s not about the score – it’s not about numbers and it never has been. The numbers, the injuries, the ones who di…didn’t make it, it’s not about that, you see, you get what I’m saying, it’s not about that, not about that. No. Not about that.

It’s about the beating. About each time I make contact, each glancing blow, each full-body hit each one every time every one…uh…yeah…what was I saying…yeah, I mean…the beating, man…it’s all about the beating. The beating. I just gotta beat them, gotta, it’s like if I don’t then why am I alive, why am I here, why did God put me on this Earth if not to beat? To beat them, huh? Answer me that – if not this, then what?

Hey, get it straight – I’m no God-bothering lunatic, frothing at the mouth, telling my tormentors that the voices made me do it. No. I’m not here on a godly mission, I’m no crusading Joan of Arc, here to convince you of a war, no. I’m not the hand of fate. I’m not looking for a legacy, or to be remembered. I’m not great and I’ve never thought myself great – I’m just me. And I need to beat them, God, every last one of them and I won’t stop, won’t rest, not one bit not one second, never, no sir, never. Not till I’ve beaten, pounded, thrashed every last one of them. Every Goddamned last one of them. Beaten.

Why – I don’t know. No, nothing they’ve done, not like I have a personal vendetta, a grudge, no score to settle, no vile act of vengeance I need to rain down on them – like I said, I’m no happy-clapping crazy. I can’t…put into words…how I feel, it’s like…a fire…like when you walk into a hall filled with girls, beautiful, beautiful girls…angels each one, and suddenly you turn and see one and you know, you just know deep down inside, like you know the sun is light and death hurts like shit, you just know that one, that single, beautiful, ethereal, lovely angel is…your soul mate – the one made just for you, and you know she knows it too. It’s a feeling like that. Not the love, not the lust, no sir, none of that, it’s the certainty. That rock-hard, unchangeable, immutable, bloody, bloody certainty, and no matter what anyone says, what they do, their words they melt like mist before the morning sun – Christ, it’s like I’m getting all poetic here…like some love-drunk faggot, whining about love. Just believe me, I’m telling you I know this feeling, this certainty, this, this…surety I have inside me, that they have to be beaten, that I have to beat, that I have to beat them, this feeling I know like I know I am alive. I just have to beat them and they have to be beaten. It’s a natural law. Like I’m some kind of predator and they are my prey. But hey, I’m no animal. No sir, don’t go thinking I’m an animal.

That’s it, man, that’s all I got. You got what you wanted – your story – your big, revealing story for your shiny, glossy magazine? Yeah? It’s fucked up, man, this shit. I mean hey what I do is…that’s…ok it’s, like I know it’s not good, but whythefuck you want my story, man, who wants to know? Who wants to know about me…about a simple…eggbeater? Man, I just don’t get that. I‘m an eggbeater…I beat eggs. I beat eggs. What do you do, man, what’s your shit?

You Cannot Shake Hands With A Closed Fist

2008-10-19T14:29:00.002+02:00

You cannot shake hands with a closed fist. I know this is true. Now. You see, I tried it, more than once. Call it the vagaries of an insidious and misspent youth, but that was how we did it back then. I s’pose it came from protecting our turf – being a member of the Fundamentals, New York’s least respected east-side gang.

You see, the Fundamentals were neither Jewish, nor Irish nor Italian but Hopi Indian, descendants of the original native North Americans displaced by that jumped-up son of a sausage maker, Christopher Columbus. Although we had more right to that land, on which the grey and steaming cesspit that was New York was built on, hundreds of years of racial cleansing by the settlers had wiped us out until we were a mere three and a half families. Half a family was Greek, by marriage.

So you see, we were fighting not for control of the drug trade, the prostitution racket or the halloed pizza-trade routes, but for our very pastoral heritage! And we were seriously outnumbered, so the only way we could have any effect, was through extreme and immediate violence.

Violence. That was how we put the FUN back into the FUNDAMENTALS! Of course, in these enlightened and educated times, I cannot pretend to condone such....effective yet amoral and antisocial and intellectually insipid behaviour...but then....ah yes, then it was a different story. You want to make a point – you hit someone. You want to underline and make it absolutely clear, hit them twice, and if you stuttered, so much the better because you could hit them interminably. Or until they died, whichever came first.

Our particular brand of physical debate was fondly named the Fundamental Closed Fist Hand-Shake, or FCFHS, for short, which if you tried to say it at half-nine of a Tuesday evening after several Cactus cocktails, made you expectorate quite viciously, and drool, rather viscously, down your double chin. Not pretty. Unless you were blind. And deaf. And especially if you had no sense of touch on your face and happened to be standing near the person trying to say FCFHS, at half-nine of a Tuesday evening after several Cactus cocktails. Dreadful. Wet. Unpleasant.

Thus it came to pass that I, as the largest and least tolerant of the hopeless Hopi Indians treading Brooklyn’s dour darkness, was to become the Left Hand of Fate (which I s’pose was better than the Right Hand of Bottom Wiping, but there you have it). It was my solemn duty to extol the many unkind regards of our chief and leader, Two Trains Running Late, to the many gangs, sub-gangs and pseudo-gangs that ruled NYC. I was duty-bound to meet with the various heads, subheads, pseudo-heads and occasionally, a neck, of the gangs, sub-gangs and pseudo-gangs that ruled NYC. As the Left Hand of Fate (and not the Right Hand of Bottom Wiping) I used what traits and tools I had on hand. I quickly found that a thick Brooklyn drawl – as in “D’ya wan’ sum cwofee on the cworna of Toidy-Toid an’ Toid’ got me nowhere, so I soon started using the Helen Keller-approved style of Making Yourself Heard, and punched everything and everyone I could. I rather pissed off my mother, but she soon learnt to keep out of arms-reach!

Anyway, it was in a close, personal and deeply intimate conversation with the head of a head of one of the gangs of NYC that I reached out and made the closing rebuttal, when I suddenly found myself surrounded by various free samples from the local constabulary. So began my time ‘inside’. The first nineteen years were fraught. Fraught with the system failing to tolerate my native conversational. They broke me, eventually, and now, forty-four years on, I have come to find I am multilingual, and am quite capable of speaking the modern languages of Peace, Tolerance and Understanding, although that last one I have trouble comprehending! The most salient of revelations I have had revealed, is that you cannot shake hands with a closed fist. No, it is better to use that closed fist to punch them to the ground, and then kick them in the nadgers!

First Words

2008-05-02T10:45:00.003+02:00

First words. Words that grab your attention and nail it, through your eyes, to this page. So important, these first words...and yet, while heady ideas swoop through my mind and weave brilliant thoughts and explanations and denouements and reasons, revealing the world for what it truly is, the first words won't come, and revelation is lost, ephemeral until the last.

Famoos!

2008-04-13T17:06:00.002+02:00

Knew it had to happen! ONE is becoming FAMOOS!

I've had two of my pics used in the online publication, Schmappets, for Southampton, UK and been asked if another can be used for Dublin.

Here are the two that are famous already:
West Quay Cars, Southampton:
http://www.schmap.com/southampton/shopping_taxis/#p=202867&i=202867.jpg

The Old George Mall, Southampton:
http://www.schmap.com/southampton/nightlife_outandabout/#p=173688&i=173688.jpg

Watch this space! I'll be a household-name yet!

(c) Dave Luis 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Mum's The Word!

2008-04-13T16:20:00.002+02:00

I have just accepted the Friend Request on Facebook of a mother of a friend of mine. It's the third maternal parental unit in my gaggle of virtual contacts on FaceBook, and I have to admit that I am a little scared by that - but not for the reasons you would imagine!

Nope - it's not that my mates' parents are chummy with me at all. It's the fact that they are techno-savvy enough and intrigued enough to work FB. My mum sent me an email ONCE. That was too much for her and she had to go and have a lie-down and a gaze longingly at her trusty old type-writer. My mum was so atechnical, she's famous for having moaned that the remote did not change the channels on the telly - while outside the garage door opened and closed madly! Her mobile phone was a strange and alien thing from the future. It gave me hours of fun dialing her and cancelling the call before she could answer. She couldn't work the call register function that would have had her busting my ruse so easily.

But my mates' mums seem to be a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of computers etc. Parents are not supposed to be able to do that. Parents should look befuddled when faced with the modern world, smile kindly and say "That's nice, dear!" They should NOT be engaging one in a virtual society!

Of course I am being hugely patronising, as at least one of those parental units was working on things PC-ian way before I was. To be brutally honest, I was a late-bloomer, technically speaking, and I still shudder at the thought of programming a telly or a DVD machine. I have technical friends for that.

But still - parents should know their place. FaceBook and the like are NOT the place for parents to be wandering around. What would they say if we pitched up at bowls, or bridge or whatever else it is that the old folk get up to.

(c) Dave Luis 2008. All Rights Reserved.

Domestic-Madgestic

2008-03-16T17:15:00.004+02:00

It's the middle of my much-needed home clean-up, on a cold and wet Sunday afternoon that would be better spent watching movies and gorging myself on delicious pancakes. The only way I can take on this most arduous and menial of tasks - menial though overwhelming, oxymoronic though that seems - only with the help of intense distraction.

So the laptop's on and music is blaring forth, setting a rhythm to my domestically sanctioned activities. My mind wandered to times of yore (because I AM a little older now, and can speak of times of yore and mean my youth, quite comfortably) when the very music blaring forth from my laptop was they very latest housey-trancey-shite that we'd shake our booties at down the club. Who'd'a thunk I'd be Martha-Stewarting to the choons of my youth? Shocker!

Anyway, I had a moment of clarity and discovered why Madonna is still so popular with all and sundry, years on - especially those of an older frame. It's not because we remember her from our youth and yearn for those heady days (though we do, but not because of Madge). It's simply because you can iron up a storm to her ditties. I made short work of several pairs of trousers and a few work shirts while singing falsetto to Ray of Light.

Madge, honey, you're a peach - housework will never be quite the same again!

No Lines Required

2008-03-12T12:26:00.003+02:00

I'm famous, me! Check out me stellar p'formance on Youtube! It has been commented that it's a very sincere performance. Wot.

There & Back, in 80 Hours, or Deliverance-lite

2007-11-05T10:37:00.000+02:00

Like most of the best ideas, this one was born under exceptional circumstances that, try as often as you like (and we DO!), you won’t be able to replicate. Let’s set the scene: Date - Thursday, sometime in early October 2007. Location? The Michelangelo Hotel, in Sandton – in the smokers’ bar, because some people are just like that! The time. Well after midnight but long before home time. The players in this little production are of course, myself; John, whom I met through unusual means; Casey – the mysterious and feisty lady friend of John; and Mark, who was to join us later. Other bit players include Michele who was a new colleague at the time and another Mark – also a colleague and an enigma in the diametrically opposing characteristics of the person he portrays and the person he is, and finally Jeané who was later to become my wellness coach – but that is another story for another, braver time. Add to the mêlée the usual crowded background throng of Sandton’s beautiful people, loud music, tequila and you have the makings of a tale that…well…is this tale, really!

It was the usual Thursday night piss-up (or ‘just one drink after work’ as Sandtonites speak of, in the local argot). We’d just left the raucous jollities at the News Café and sauntered in sonorous inebriation to the FTV Café. Casey & Jeané had missioned off to get properly attired for the event, leaving John, Michele, Mark and myself to sort the entry. I was barred because of my shoes – at least the door troll had the decency if not the good sense not to call them ‘takkies’, which would have been. John and I went to the bar at the Michelangelo to await Casey and the ‘proper shoes and shirt’ she’d collected from John’s place. It was here, on our umpteenth liver-thumping beverage that we thought a post-midnight call to my brother George (see the chapter on how I met John) was in order. We reached Lara, his lady friend, and implored her to forgive yet another early-morning call from us and in making peace decided to accept her invitation to visit. Long story short, why three weeks later we set off, intrepid voyagers every last one of us, on a 500km journey into the heart of nowhere.

Ok I say ‘set off’, but at three o’clock when John and I left iBurst House in Sandton on Friday the 25th, knowingly entering the mad traffic fray at the inappropriately named rush-hour. 42 minutes later we arrived at his apartment to collect his clothes. I mention this only because John’s apartment is less than 2km from iBurst House, such was the volume of traffic. Discovering he’d left his key at the office, he gallantly proposed to buy the weekend’s wardrobe once we arrived in Musina, our final destination.

We sallied forth, Pretoria-wards, to collect Casey and meeting mark along the way. It was around 6-ish when we got on the road proper. Fate’s a cruel thing, and just as we left the backward reaches of Pretoria’s stake, Casey got a call to a film shoot she’d auditioned for the day before. It seemed a day of indecision as much humming and ha-ing and phoning of agents followed, by which time we were so far en route it seemed likely that a return trip would only occur in the early hours of the following morning, if at all, for the blasted film shoot.

As is narratively correct, the skies were dark and broody with the burgeoning night and the tumultuous storms that rode it. The first part of the trip was uneventful as only quiet, well-sign-posted roads and a comfortable Audi can produce, until we pulled up in Naboomspruit for dinner. It was here that I met Mark again. We’d met a few weeks earlier when he took a job at iBurst for all of one day so I’d not got the chance to know anything other than his name. It was soon established that Mark was a man of many talents, no least of which was the capacity to laugh at my one-liners; I proclaimed silently to myself that the weekend’s success lay ahead.

We rejoined the serpentine tar, unravelling into the darkness and made for the home stretch. It was now, after a long day, a long week really, and with fully bellies tugging at our eyelids that the way forward became interesting. It should be noted that there is an ancient Chinese curse that intones, “May you live in interesting times” and it is not a wish for a fun-filled weekend, but rather a lifetime of drama and hardship. I think someone up there had pulled the curse card on us for the remainder of the trek was fraught, truly fraught, with all manner of distraction and obstacle. These included a detour in Polokwane following Brother George’s overly-simplified directions; total darkness; ever-diminishing and pockmarked roads; blanketing mist in the mountains which hid a large semi-articulated truck (although I never heard it utter a word!) and hairpin curves upon hairpin bends.

We arrived at Villa Italia shortly before eleven in the evening, and were immediately made to imbibe several disgusting concoctions by my little big brother, James, before retiring to our pied a terre for the weekend. Thankfully the…accommodation…as it was, was just across the road, along several twisted dark and severely untarred roads.

To say it was Spartan is to miss a wonderful opportunity to say it was rustic, basic, bucolic and other words ending in –ic indicative of, well, nothingness. A cluster of rondawels – those odd round houses with thatched roofs – huddled around a majestic baobab that served as the centrepiece for a boma. We unpacked, careful not to leave shoes on the floor least any wayward scorpion or snake took up residence overnight. We picked up where we’d left off at Villa and gathered some ale and other such things and stood round the fire, swapping stories of ego-busting proportions and doing our best to capture the elusive moon on our host of cameras.

The excitement was not over yet, not by a long shot, as my resident paranoia took hold while…performing my ablutions and subsequently hearing what seemed to be footsteps outside the bathroom. Being assured by my brother that there was no one else there, my hackles rose, and being a city boy at heart, John took to the heroic cause and gun at the ready, searched the undergrowth for my apparent attacker. Of course there was no one there. There never is, when it’s night and I see them. So we mosied off to John’s car to retrieve the last of the goodies – and this is where I saw yet again how contagious this rampant beast could be, when we rounded a corner – a very easy thing to do in a place bursting with circular buildings, and a sudden shadow on a wall was enough to trigger John’s survival instincts and quick as you like, his sidearm was out the holster, cocked and aimed…I pity the shadow that makes a move on John. This rather set the tone for the evening, which played itself out with many a glance into the darkness, checking on the multitude of villains we knew to be there.

Saturday arrived in the normal fashion, with sunrise and the various inconsequential noises of beasties untamed and we set off to leave our mark on dorpie we’d travelled so far to visit. To report any one fact will be dangerous, as true to tradition, we oiled the machinery of the day with impressive amounts of alcohol, the low cost of being in the Styx proving a wonderful thing as we threw back round after round at nearly no cost at all. There was much cajoling and high spirits and racing through town – I imagine there was even some relief that Casey and I survived the local golf club, as our cosmopolitan outlook was at odds with the …very differently imbued personas that we encountered there.

So it was off to Villa where lunch was had – a mighty repast, in my case, that Brother George went some way to ensure was more than perfect, knowing as he does my peculiar and refined tastes. There followed a rugby match on the telly, though I was little concerned with this arb event as I was engaged in the seduction of a local married man. It was truly a work of craft, lasting several hours – I am still inclined to the UK manner of seduction, where a quick glance at the eyes and then the crotch is enough to secure a jolly good rodgering. Being as it was, a conservative town with a less than stellar approach to the fabulous iniquities of the overt homosexual, the seduction had to play itself out carefully. I am not sure we succeeded in our clandestine groping, before heading off to the homestead to see John and Casey off home for that pestilential film shoot. Mark and the man I’d dragged home talked on till late, causing me to actually abandon all thoughts of salacious activities and I eventually announced I was off to bed – which had the rather pleasant effect of retiring Mark for the evening and my lay to return to his priapic needs, and a jolly good rodgering was had, after all.

Sunday brought with it sunlight and the return home, which was uneventful save for a freshly-squished snake in the road; a body in a gully and a robbery in progress in Polokwane.
And so the travellers, having scarred the northern-most reaches of the land, returned whence they’d come, and all was good with the world.

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

Splitter!

2007-11-05T10:26:00.000+02:00

There is something rotten in the state of togetherness. It seems everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, friends and colleagues are splitting up, getting divorced, going it alone.

It seems since I helped keep a couple together earlier this year - counselled them, talked them down from the heights of anger and coached them up through the depths of despair – that all around me who had good relationships based on love and trust and friendship, that all these connections are failing. They are cracking up under immense pressure, straining against unstoppable forces, and dying.

Perhaps in preventing, I put some eldritch forces into action, some ancient evil that will not rest until the couple I helped have split acrimoniously, terribly, aggressively, bloodily – and gone their separate ways.

One couple, who has been together almost as long as I’ve known them, and who have an exquisite daughter, have become warring tyrants, each inflicting an even more hurtful pain on the other with each passing hour. Another couple I know, a model couple in looks, have let slip the dogs of war and thrown each other to the wolves. Yet another couple, she is a friend and colleague with an inner demon so turbulent and destructive, that I wonder if she will survive it – I hold no hope for her marriage. I recently met another chap on a trip away who is splitting after 9 years over seemingly trivial matters that are actually the symptoms of years of not resolving issues. A good friend from work divorced 2 months ago – although I believe that to be the best thing that could have happened in their damaging situation. Still another colleague at work recently split from her man after 11 years – although I’d not got to know them properly when it happened but it DID coincide with my starting a new job.

I have to wonder if my years of being single and becoming ever more militant about it and preaching the ills of relationships – their restrictions, the incumbent sacrifices needed, the chains that tie and bind, if my vilification of these things has become this malevolent energy, driving a wedge between any two people I meet, who are in a relationship. I certainly proclaim my sovereignty and give discourse to the many freedoms I enjoy often enough for all around me to know I am more than a free agent; I am resolute in my solitude.

The question is, then, have I always brought ruin to the relationships around me, while remaining unscathed, or is it only of late that my militancy has claimed victims? Earlier this year I decided that I was ready to enter a relationship again, but soon realised that vocalising this brought unwanted attentions from well-meaning friends and I soon restored the status quo. With this new notion brought to life I have to wonder if those same well-meaning friends were trying desperately to curb this wicked entity that stalked me.

The pathology of my own disastrous attempts at relationships – 11 in about as many years, of both genders – will prefer the reasoning behind my peculiar seclusion. Though I remain friendly with 5 of my exes, the relationships were anything but.

Fear, secrecy, distrust, an overwhelming sense of duty and rejection were more characteristic of these flings than the more pedestrian and favoured qualities expounded by norm and Hollywood. In the end, I created enough imbalances to force the poor souls chained to mine to dump me. That was part of the plan – I could not bring myself to do the actual ending of the relationships, barring the last two. I somehow believed that the dumpee garnered more sympathy than the dumper, though those in our inner circle knew the truth about the matter.

Now, years later, I often revisit these failed unions in deep melancholia and wonder if we took another stab at it if it work. No doubt they wouldn’t – although I’m aware of the numerous issues that made me uncomfortable enough to prevent long-term unions that does not mean I’ve made any headway in changing them. For the first time I realise I really AM comfortable on my own, that I do relish the solitude that is my constant bedfellow, and that the whimsy and impulsiveness that drive my being and quell my impatience are honed to a fine but extreme art in my daily existence. Would I love someone there when I woke up? Yes, but I’d probably be annoyed that he was there, I’d hate his snoring, dislike his body odour, want nothing more than to be in any room that he was not. Realising this and realising it’s not so bad – in fact it is far more desirable than feigning love for someone who gets under your skin – is probably a lot healthier for me than any other alternative.

No, I’ve lectured on this before in my musings and I’ll do so again, countless times no doubt, but the fact remains, I am my own man, I run free and am not tethered by the exquisite torture of love and the agonising death of the wondrous singular creation that is me. For those around me who delve into the oft-plumbed shallows of a relationship, take care, for I’ll remind you of who you were and what you’ve lost. It may be too vast a truth to contemplate. You may find your relationship on the rocks of disquietude and think to yourself, that when you took those vows promising that no man should put your bond asunder, was it me you were thinking about, or your own inner self, yearning for the freedom and solitude that comes with being alone?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUE & MICHAEL!

2007-09-23T11:54:00.000+02:00

Sue (Mom2) and Michael (nutter in Dallas) celebrated their birthdays today. WOOOOOOHOO!! I was at Sue's bash, a sun-filled frolic around the braai with the family (too much sun, some beer and just enough of Lynne's trifle). Couldn't make it to Mike's bash in Dallas - didn't have enough gas to get there.

May you have plenty more, people - the world needs nutters like you in it!

Love - me!

Reactionary

2007-09-23T10:16:00.000+02:00

In today's Sunday Times there were a number of little bits that deserve a reaction. So here's MY Sunday Times:

Jake White's biography is entitled 'Black & White'. From what I've heard about how he conducts business, his brother John should entitle HIS biography 'SHADY'. But that's such a boring story I'm not wasting any more time tell you about it.

I'm usually not interested in Idols South Africa, because of the pedantic primadonnas who call themselves judges, and their attendant contrived 'personalities', but the story about contestant Tender Mavundla's courageous decision to disclose her HIV-positive status made me feel proud on her behalf. Here is a woman with a death sentence hanging over her and she's not letting that hold her back - she's living her dream and is not ashamed of the disease that is her constant companion. What is annoying (and it's nothing more than that because Belinda Cherry IS nothing more than that) is the reaction from Belinda Cherry, who said, according to the Sunday Times, "I bit myself on Saturday and shared a drink with Tender on Sunday morning. Now, I was put in a situation that I had no control over...and that makes me fucking angry!" (Nice language Mz. Cherry - really shows your breeding and class!) The counsellor appointed to handle the situation told her "You have every right to say this. I see fear in you as a result of a lack of knowledge" Damn right Mz. Cherry has the right to be angry but that anger should be directed at herself - how can any adult living in South Africa today be so naive about HIV/AIDS? You cannot get HIV or AIDS from sharing a drink. Mz. Cherry - you have MY vote on Idols - to be ousted for sheer intolerance and naivety! I know my rant shows my own intolerance but, if you'll excuse me for revealing my own breeding and class, Mz. Cherry you're a damn fool - a selfish little girl. Karma will reward you, dear, just see if it doesn't!
In another story, sex offender Grant Umpleby, accused of impregnating his friend's 15 year-old daughter, was sentenced to a year's house arrest and R8000 fine. No doubt the man is a sexual predator and a slime-ball of note - who gets turned on by their friend's teenage daughter? BUT what gets my goat is that all and sundry are portraying the young lover as an innocent victim when she is no such thing. She went to meet Umpleby on 5 occasions to engage in their sexual acts - some thing she wanted as much as he did and if it wasn't for her being with sprog, they would no doubt still be banging away like mad rabbits. No doubt he manipulated her, that's called seduction, but it's no more evil because of her youth and inexperience (note I didn't say innocence) than a Lothario seducing a 25 year-old virgin. The more experienced will always hold the upper hand and be able to manipulate the situation to serve their ends. She's playing the victim role so well here, and really, she's the winner in this case all round, as she's managed to focus her daddy's anger at Umpleby, all the while crying foul, garnered sympathy through the media and will, if she can be believed, embark on a legal career to aid 'other' victims of sexual offences. Lolita - that's my name for her, and a fitting one I think - the press won't reveal her identity - is playing the card that she was the victim of statutory rape - that's the state's word for her in this case, even though she was, no doubt, a VERY willing accomplice. Lolita's Daddy - take heed - it's a well known fact that kids are getting older younger - it's referred to as KAGOY, in fact, and we often talk about kiddults. Your daughter knew what she was doing and probably wanted to seduce Umpleby just as much as that sleazeball wanted your daughter - birds of a feather, as they say.

I'd comment more, but I'm rather put off by the fact we live in a country of stupid, crooked sluts. I'm off to schnaai someone in a business deal, make some derogatory comments about some brave people I know nothing about and then seduce some jail-bait. See ya!

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

Putting the 'Personnelity' back into Personnel!

2007-09-23T08:14:00.000+02:00

Having told RothkoRed that my new office desk puts the 'cute' back into executive, he tirelessly slaved away, envisioning a world where the Personnel Director's desk was flush with plush toys - of the Disney persuasion.

He sent me some of his...er...visions. They're too good not to share:

"You see, Bob... Mr Froggy isn't happy. He knows what you've been doing with the office supplies, and he's told Miss Piggy too. See how she's facing the window, she can't even look at you... I'm afraid we'll have to let you go."

"Yes, Sean, I understand you have made a request for compassionate leave, and really it certainly is tragic when one's entire family is brutally murdered in their beds but I want you to take a look at My Little Pony here... when her best friend, the Power Puff girl Stella lost an arm to the automatic pencil sharpener, she took it in her stride. Just look at her golden mane... honestly she's thriving despite the heartache. Don't you want to be like the little Pony that could, Sean? huh?"

"OK, Sarah, I've asked Kermit and the Cabbage Patch kid to stage a little re-enactment of what happened in the staff kitchen yesterday... and let me tell you it's not easy trying to get into a leather harness when you're a cotton-filled frog. I think you can tell from the expression on Buzz Lightyear's face that we're all a little shocked and upset."

It's like Dilbert meets The Twilight Zone!

Read RothkoRed for more insight into this...mind....

A Confussion of Werbs

2007-09-19T10:00:00.000+02:00

We all do it – get words verschmangled as we wax lyrically in our daily discussion. Verbose fools do it. Vocabular amateurs do it – a lot. You do it. I do it – hell, Nike probably even does it. Just.

Tonight I heard a fair number from a loved-one, so she’ll remain nameless because I love her too much to shame her like this. To start tonight she mentioned her sequenced shoes and at first I thought Michael Crichton had released a new fantasy flick about re-animated podiatropods, prehistoric footwear fashionistas gone mental. But no, she actually meant her sequinned shoes. Shiny, but neither a miracle of science, nor a danger to insular island-dwellers.

Sniggering quietly to myself, as I’m wont to do, I listened intently as she told me about her new medicine, her prostrate supplement. I deserve a Nobel Prize, if not even a noble one, for the monumental feat of stony-faced attentiveness I feigned, all the while inside I rolled around on my mind’s floor, cluttered as it was. I thought it unkind to point out that perhaps it was her phosphate supplement, rather than her unmentionable. I left then to get her Flurries, from McDonald’s.

But she’s not the only one – another family member has referred to ‘freshly squozen orange juice’ which I can only imagine was squeezed at some extreme latitudes, either north or south, quite pole-ish. And HER daughter is quite fond of sapghetti, too!
And before you think I’m lording it over these people and my readers, in the certain knowledge that I am perfection, verbalised, I’ve once talked about ackweecing before, rather than acquiescing. I didn’t give up there though, and have also tried to pay the municitypalicity, unsuccessfully. And then of course I used to say that things moving together are going forth in unision, which sounded a lot more sophistiqué than unison. Sophisticated unsophistry aside, it’s quite fun, when someone contuses their werbs and says what they means rather than what is, innit? Hardly ever do you think they're shining wits, as Matty would say!

Relatively Sure

2007-09-19T09:55:00.000+02:00

Perchance the other day I rented a DVD entitled something like Fantastic Universe or Fabulous Universe or something along those lines. It was a bit of a misnomer as the title that appeared when I pushed ‘Play’ was Nova, although it was the correct DVD.

It’s all got to do with the new (relatively) Theory of Everything, or M-Theory, formerly String Theory and it deals with the unification of the General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. These two were previously family members who didn’t talk at Christmas get-togethers.

As it’s a 5 hour DVD and I’m known to draw things out, and obfuscate them, so I’ll keep it as short and sweet as I can by simply saying I know can quite concisely describe, in layman’s terms, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

E’s GToR has to do with the gravitational effects on large objects, such as ourselves, Newton’s apples and planetary bodies, and how they interact on each other within the space-time fabric. Earth is not held in position by some magical, sticky glue around the sun, but quite simply it moves around the curves created in the fabric of space-time by the mass of the sun, and while the plane of the Earth’s movement around the sun is linear respective to our perception, that does not mean that all the bodies orbiting the sun orbit on the same y-coordinate on an imaginary line drawn through our sun’s poles, nor does it mean they all orbit on the same pitch, or angle, as evinced by Pluto.

There. Simple, eh? For my next trick, I’ll divulge what quantum mechanics are. And in the advanced lesson I’ll tell you why E’s GToR is, at first glance, incompatible with quantum mechanics, and how M-Theory resolves that incompatibility.

Stand closer, my lovelies – the test tubes grow needful!

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

DreamJob

2007-09-19T09:52:00.000+02:00

I’m one of those people who take forever to find what they really want out of life. I always think I know what I want from the outset, but that usually turns out to be what other people want for themselves, and I was just following popular opinion. Along the line I’ve therefore done things that were other people’s dreams, or just made to sound so great but which were actually uberhumdrum, dreary and just not me.

I tried working for myself for a while and found that I was too nice a boss and gave myself a whole lot more time off than was good for the business.

Writing has been something I’ve toyed with, on the side, for fun, for a while now and a number of people have told me along the way to make a go of getting paid for it. Donné and Dennis were huge protagonists of the Pay Dave to Write Movement, but fervent as they were, the PDtWM had little success. Less even than I did, when at last I came to realise that writing was my dream – a real dream and not just some substituted daydream, and so realising, submitting various pieces to such esteemed bulletins as Cosmo, Fair Lady, The Sunday Times and The Weekender but to no monetary or celebrity gain. I’d been published before, many times - just not for money. Perhaps this time, as the intent was filthy lucre and not pure art and edification, karma broke down and no quantum mechanic would touch it.

So the dream was packed away, and realisation set in that writing was something done purely for fun, and for a limited readership of like-minded individuals who grabbed 5 minutes a year to scan my ramblings.

Time passed in another mindless waitering job before, like some beacon in the night, iBurst happened, and while the job offered was menial at first, and a temporary offering, the dynamic entity that is iBurst soon evolved the job into something fun, heady and engaging – and as the contract approached it’s end, life’s divine plan was revealed, as the role of internal communications was presented as an offering for my consideration. Needless to say, my consideration was, as is usual, infinitesimal in its duration, so as to be almost non-existent, albeit vast in its scope. I heroically made no certain answer, however, for an agonising 48 hours, as I’d also been considered for a customer relations position, something I’d done in most of my previous jobs, and something I knew I could do well. That was not my dream, my passion. Come time, I unhesitatingly accepted the writing job and now wonder at this marvellous thing before me, of being paid to put thought to paper (or web, as it were!)

In such fairytales there is often a glittering angel or homely fairy godmother who effects, through the catalyst of sacrifice, some divine reward, and this is no different – CK – you are that angel, and the dream you’ve brought is very real, very tangible – and the sacrifice, to remain in South Africa rather than return, unemployed, to the UK, is one I gladly make.

Thank you.

Cracker!

2007-09-19T09:21:00.000+02:00

Go out and hire 'SPACED' immediately and watch Episode 6 right NOW because if, like me, the 90's meant anything to you then this is so spot on it's frightening! Go on - try it - you KNOW you wanna!

One Knows Trump

2007-08-17T06:43:00.000+02:00

At 3:45am today our Stepmum, Aunty Lynne, died. Her body finally had enough and let her go to my dad. Aunty Lynne, you taught us so much about love and forgiveness and seeing God in the details that you will carry on living in our love and our lives. You will always be as close as our hearts and as far as our memories. Go to your rest, go to Dad. He and Mum and Annie are waiting patiently to start your first proper game of bridge in a long time!

With much love - Ian, Lynn, George, James and your Little Rubbish.

The Shopping Prayer

2007-07-19T09:46:00.000+02:00

Our Kurt Geiger, who art in Spitz,

Hallowed be thy Carvella.

Thy Lacost come.

Thy will be worn in townships,

as they are in Sandton.

Give us Versace

for daily wear,

and forgive us for buying Pro-Actions

as we forgive those

who wear no-name.

Lead us not into buying Fong-Kongs

but deliver us from PEP

for thine is the Levi's,

the Diesel and the Nike

for ever and ever,

Blacklisted.

- Anonymous

Very Sick Notes by RothkoRed

2007-07-18T11:36:00.000+02:00

RothkoRed has posted something exceedingly titillating about his misspent youth at Pretoria Boys High. I'll not pillage his posting by copying it here, but here is a sumptuous sampling of the evils he contemplates:

"Please excuse Cuthbert from class this afternoon - he has an enormous sebaceous cyst which needs lancing. The last time we left it too late and it exploded spontaneously at Jimmy Goldberg's birthday party, spraying this cottage cheese like pus all over the cake which was a terrible embarrassment (although it could probably only have improved the flavour knowing Gloria's cooking). It was especially trying as it happened just days after the poor boy's biological mother was arrested at the border again. Thanks so much!"

LOVE your hair! Hope you win!

2007-07-18T10:32:00.000+02:00

Had an AWESOME (as in 'it begets awe') chat to Mel in the UK last night. She is the Deperate Housewife in Kimpton, Hampshire, who I stayed with in December & January while I was finding myself. I did find myself, on the floor of her kitchen. Often. It was just like that, because Kimpton is so small it's not even a village. It may just be a vil or even a lage (or even a small). It could be a hamlet, but there was nought that was rotten in its state and it is a trip from Denmark, so no, it probably isn't a hamlet either. But it's small. Very small. To quote Terry P, it probably doesn't even show up on a map of itself, so it's a good place to go to find yourself - there's hardly anything else there, so you tend to show up rather quickly, if you're looking properly.

Anyway, Mel and I spent days cooking, making cocktails and dancing to David-Bloody-Essex and Belinda Carlisle (how DO you spell that surname???), chanteurs whose songs allegedly changed Mel's life. They changed my life, they did - I've never had such a longing to be deaf before! We also rediscovered our friendship - we'd met a decade prior to our Kimpton cavorting, when Mel was a Beauty School trollop and I'd begun making room in my freshly vacated closet for shoes.

On our various jaunts around Hampshire (because Kimpton can close in on you rather suddenly and it became necessary to go galloping off across the plains) we'd remark on things and people around us. On one such adventure, we were circling a roundabout (which is the proper thing to do) at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed in Mel's 'soccer-mom' Volvo when we passed a Nellie Norah in a Vauxhall Corsa with something horrible on her head. I'm not blind - it was her hair, and being me, all I could do was quip "LOVE your hair! Hope you win!".

It is a testament to the safety inherent in Volvos that we survived, as Mel practically rolled the car as loud guffaws escaped her lips, my whippy-quip having rendered her near-hysterical. It was among the first of many times when we'd let rip with a less than friendly whatla and do you know I don't think we'll ever top it for sheer brilliance - although Mel's admonishment of a dizzy queen at Two Brewers who was fast exceeding the flap-per-second limit, when she quipped him with "Honey! Tone it down a little! You're flapping!" was an admirable effort!

EVERYONE needs a Mel in their life! It makes life worth living!

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

A Dedication!

2007-07-18T10:25:00.000+02:00

Only because she SWOONED over it, does she actually get her very own dedication on my ACTUAL blog (as opposed to what, Dave - your virtual blog - the one the virtually NO-ONE reads?)...anyway, where WAS I? Oh yes, in Vlakplaas, having tea, with Winnie. Met Eish.

Dammit! I get SO mad when I get so sidetracked!

Right! Oh yes! Candice Du Plessis, a fellow iBurst nutter, actually PHONED me (on an internal office phone yes, but still!) to tell me she LOVED my blog. Which is a lot more than my jaded existing readership. So this entry is dedicated to her and to Nicole Menego, another iBurst nutjob who is pleasantly amused by my random thoughts.

Photos to follow! (Unless C. & N. bribe me enough!)

Facebook? Bah! Humbug!

2007-07-17T08:03:00.000+02:00

So this FaceBook craze has swept the WORLD as we know it. Just like myspace did. I thought it would pass, this net networking thing, just as the myspace craze did, but, alas! All the the normal, sane, hard-working adult-like grown-up folks (and my friends!) are ALL members of this virtual vortex!

Not only that, my BROTHER is on FaceBook! When the hell did he learn how to even USE a computer, never mind actually do something like get a profile on FaceBook??? He's a whizz around the pots 'n pans of his restaurant, and whizzier on his 'Fiets, but let's face it - the man's no technowhizz. Or is he...?

I find it hard to fathom the nature of the interest in FaceBook. Admittedly, blogging is a leetle passé, but then I have been known to cling to the relics of outmoded fashions a tad. It seems, though, that all and sundry are adding FaceBook to their list of Things To Have, and Matt has even been quoted as saying "I cannot for the life of me imagine anything better nor more improved nor newer nor more fabulous than Facebook" although I imagine the boy was being übercafetious* at the time. He does that.

Well, I'm nothing if not a follower of the most world-sweeping of trends. My iPod, converse AllStars and Prince Albert will attest to that, so it comes as no surprise that I too am FaceBook bound. But I don't have to like it!

* facetious. Yes, I know.

A Year Today

2007-06-25T08:02:00.000+02:00

Mum passed away a year ago today. We miss you tons and talk about you and to you often! You're always as far as our memories and as close as close as our hearts!

With lots of love and fond memories!Your kids - Lynn, George, James & David

Hey! Teacher! Leave Those Kids Alone!

2007-06-10T02:18:00.000+02:00

Striking government workers have plunged our country into chaos. Oh, not for the ordinary citizen, like me, who goes to work and then goes home every day, without the misfortune of having to deal with any government department, but for the many millions who have kids in schools, who work or have family members in state-run hospitals - the list goes on ad infinitum.
Let's face it - we all made the joke that no one would notice any difference if any our apparently incompetent, apathetic government workers hit the road. And to tell you the truth, at first I'm sure many didn't - a shocking point in favour of not only not giving these lazy fools a pay rise, but also a mitigating circumstance in terminating their (dis)service.

But let's focus on the schools. Government schools have closed down as teacher demanding a 12% pay increase have downed chalk and dusters and walked out. This didn't seem to budge those signing the pay cheques, so the next move taken by those entrusted with the care and education of our children was to descend like the plague they are on the private schools and threaten the teachers there.

My colleague, Yvonne, had to rush to her daughter's school last week to collect little Michaela before the riotous mob from the government school down the road arrived to beat up the private school teachers.

The Sunday Times today carries the story of Tasneem Beukes who was strangled by a teacher as she tried to write her maths exam. This is simply unacceptable - what kind of filthy animal attacks a child who has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue at hand, namely the pay rise demanded by these violent thugs, who until recently posed as educators? What are they teaching our kids by acting like this?

Whatever the case HAD been, with regards to the pay rise, fools like this man who strangled Tasneem (who thankfully survived the attack), it now becomes one of safety. Will our kids feel safe going to school again, knowing it was a group of those chosen to care for them that had turned on them? Will the parents ever trust teachers again? The harm done is, I fear, irreparable.

In 6 days we celebrate lives of those who died in the 1976 Student Uprising in Sharpeville, Soweto. Hundreds died that day, fighting against apartheid in education. They gave their lives fighting for the greater good. Here we stand on the eve of anniversary of the massacre of these noble souls, and all around us teachers are fighting, looting, threatening and assaulting fellow teachers and students - not for some noble cause, not because there is some malignant evil oppressing them, but simply for money. Filthy lucre.

Education is a noble calling. It has never been one that guarantees riches, and yes, to be fair, a fair wage should be paid to those who we entrust the intellectual and character building of our children. it seems to me that we have made a grave mistake letting these people look after our nations children in the first place. These are people who have resorted to violence and assaulting our children in order to line their pockets - not with untold riches, granted, but for nothing noble either.

Any sympathy I may have had for the allegedly underpaid teachers has long since evaporated. I call on our Minister of Education to not only ban these striking teachers from ever teaching again, but to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law - they attacked our children - let them rot in jail, or in the streets.

Teachers of South Africa - tread carefully near our children - you're entrusted with our future.

(c) Dave Luis - 2007. All Rights Reserved

I'm Bursting With Pride!

2007-05-30T04:49:00.000+02:00

I've started at iBurst and the story of my first day is to follow - but it involved Tequila, which is good, and a hangover, which is not!

ATPWhoring

2007-03-30T09:03:00.000+02:00

Just been watching the ATP Masters in Miami, the quarter-finals match between Nadal and Djokovic (or something like that) and my Lord! but each time they hit the bloody ball they let out a groan of epic (and lustful) proportions. So much so, that when they had a decent rally it reminded me a lot of some of my sexual liaisons. Except of course we never had as many ball-boys in attendance. Hmmmm.....

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved.

Human Doings

2007-03-27T08:04:00.000+02:00

If doing sustains being, but being is required for doing, then I'm halfway to finding my new doing. I think.

Fiat Ohno - The Drive of Your Life!

2007-03-25T10:15:00.000+02:00

I've driven many cars in my 15 years of legal driving, some mundane modes of transport, others more exotic. The exotics were stupendous driving machines that evoked emotions at every curve - Mercedes 450SL (in left-hand garb, to add to the thrill), BMW 328i Cabriolet (when they were new thank you so very much) and a glorious test drive in an 89 Porsche 928S.

My own car history has some desirable machinery in it - Mazda MX-5, BMW 328i and the Peugeot 306 Cabriolet - although admittedly after a few months the only desire that piece of rubbish evoked was the one to set fire to it.

Nothing I have driven, however, has evoked such strong emotion, instilled such a visceral sense of, well, wonderment, I s'pose, as the Fiat Uno Fire belonging to my sister's mum-in-law, which she very kindly lent me as my BMW is in Cape Town, living the laid back life with my sister.

Normally a motoring review would at some point bowl you over with a list of the fabulous appointments and optional extras that make a car to dazzling and stupendous. So I shall, as well. This particular example has 4 doors - 5, if you count that boot thing. It has 4 wheels and windows that lower into the door by simply winding the, um, winder. There seems to be an engine in the front and air-con every time you open the window. There are three pedals where you would expect to find them. And a roof, the car definitely has a roof.

More impressive is the list of what's wrong with the vehicle - and what a prodigious list it is! Firstly, this morning in order to get going, I had to free-wheel for several hundred metres down Jan Smuts Avenue in Hyde Park in order to jump start the demonic 1.1-litre monster - I mean motor, lurking beneath the bonnet. Thankfully it was a Sunday, so not much traffic. Even more thankfully, most of the well-heeled who were pootling along in their Cayenne Turbos thought I was some kind of performance artist, so not many hurled abuse, as is Jozi's wont, when fools abound in traffic.

Having coaxed a pulse, Frankenstein-like, from the motor, I next had to deal with the shock absorbers. It seems that some dastardly thief has cunningly stolen the shock absorbers and replaced them with empty bicycle pumps, effectively rendering them more shock amplifier than shock absorber. Some low-slung sports cars' suspension bottoms out over speed bumps and too-steep inclines - the Uno's bottoms out on smooth, flat surfaces - of which there are a few in Jozi. But not many - so the Uno bumped me up and down violently over the more often occurring potholes, ripped tar and disappearing highways.

That awesome engine - awesome because I was in awe that it could move the admittedly light Uno body, and I personally wouldn't trust it to power a desktop fan, whined and complained all the way to the highway on-ramp and I questioned the sense of even trying to merge with traffic with the little 1.1-litre cripple. Thankfully, Jozi's notorious M1 played it's usual role with traffic at a virtual standstill because of someone, somewhere driving with one of the 800,000 bogus driving licenses currently floating round South Africa. That meant I could at least keep pace with the traffic flow to begin with. As we passed the foul-up, however, I was soon left behind, with 18-wheelers, cripples in wheelchairs and the occasional factory overtaking me and leaving me in the dust. Oh it wasn't all that bad - on one particularly steep downhill, aided by following wind, I managed a dizzying 121-and-a-half km/h! The mind boggles that the doors were not forcibly ripped from their rusting hinges by the wind of my passage!

Arriving in Pretoria a full hour earlier than I had anticipated (in fact I had wondered if I'd even reach Pretoria at all...) I had only to contend with the fact that while breaking as I cornered (not oft advised in the best of circumstances) the one working break broke and attached itself to the wheel and the chassis, thereby locking itself irretrievably and spinning the car out gracefully, to the delight of all around me. This was easily overcome by the simple expedient of leaning heavily to one side, thereby making good use of the sagging shocks, to lift the locked wheel bodily off the ground and limp the last few blocks to my destination.

The trip was not a complete loss, though, as we enjoyed a cracking barbecue on the bonnet of the seriously overheated "engine" and the resultant conflagration was a nice, vengeful counterpoint to the humiliation I suffered on Jan Smuts earlier that morning.

My trip back to Jozi was in a luxurious and much safer and faster 40-year old decrepit minibus taxi, with 500 other souls.

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

StarChild

2007-03-19T06:19:00.000+02:00

Everyone should have friends like mine. On my return from London, my friends saw to it that I had a place to stay (Chris's spare home in Linden) and something nice to drive in (Dustin's spare Mercedes 260E).

I've always wanted a Mercedes, but have never been old enough to pull it off. But, as they say, some have greatness thrust upon them, and the greatness of the '92 model, in arctic white, was likewise thrust upon me.

A regal beast of a certain age, Agatha (as she's been lovingly named by Dustin) is no speed queen. Powered by a six cylinder 2.6 litre motor you'd think Agatha was quick off the mark, but that's not what she's all about. Agatha is no boy racer's bitch.

Most women would punch you in the chops if you called them heavy, but Agatha's awesome weight is a selling point, I think - I've never driven a car that feels as solid and steady on the road. You almost get the feeling that if you were to have an accident in this 15 year old behemoth, it is reality that would be left a little distorted, and not Agatha's sleek nose.

Because Agatha is a little older than most, she's not wearing airbags this season, and her mod-cons read like a list of favourites from a bygone era. Her air-con, however, should be the envy of any modern car, as it came close to freeze-drying my tits on several occasions.

Again, tell any lady her rear is fat and you're likely to wake up in intensive care. Not Agatha - she proudly displays her cavernous rump for all to see - in fact she's got the sexiest stump-like C-pillars that show off the curve of her J.Lovian bum to great effect.

Like many grandmothers Agatha has her quirks. Some grandmothers forget the names of their nearest and dearest. Others wet their drawers. Still others play bridge at you. Agatha had her own little quirks - her daily tipple of pint of oil and a trough of fuel, and her propensity to stall in first. That being said her quirkiness makes her all the more lovable and it was with a sad heart that I handed the keys over to the new owner when Dustin decided to downsize his family a little and make them a little more nuclear (by means of a Mercedes A190 and a BMW325i).

Now that I've proven I can pull off being a Merc driver, I must cultivate new and exciting friendships so that I can be lent another stunning example of German engineering when next I find myself carless in a big city.

Like I said, everyone needs friends like mine.

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

33 Years Young!

2007-03-19T05:47:00.000+02:00

It seems that I have to face facts and accept that I am getting older. Not wiser, mind you, but certainly older. My recent horrific follicular incident in London nearly had me spinning out of control, the result of my discovery of what at first appeared to be several grey hairs but what turned out to be tiny feathers, expectorated from my pillow during the night.

Today, however, I cannot brush aside so easily the evidence of ageing, I am older. I know this because it is my birthday, and how much more evidence do you need to prove you're getting older? Huh? None. Exactly.

So, am I ageing gracefully, I ask? How do I know? How does anyone know? I've not come across the Lett's Guide To Ageing Gracefully at Exclusive Books yet. National Geographic has yet to air Decades From Disaster: Growing Old Gracefully. Heat Magazine's 'Red Circle of Shame' has nothing to do with ageing disasters so much as paparazzi awareness failure. I am therefore at a loss to know if I am ageing gracefully.

I suspect though, that as I age, grace is going to go out the window and the more immediate of pleasures and incendiary of opinions will come home to roost. As I grow older I will care less and less about offending people's sensibilities, in favour of my own.

One thing that is going to happen is that I'm going to apologise less! I'm 33, deitydammit, and I've every right to my opinions, principles and beliefs as the next guy and for once, they're going to have to tread carefully for offending my own very delicate (yet robust and Conran-esque) senses!

Yes! That's it! I'm going to be like that Nan character on the Catherine Tate show, and bulldoze through life, expecting things to go my way and be for me own convenience at all times, and when they're not, cries of "Wotafukkingliberty!" and "Wotaloadofoldhorseshit!" will be heard!

From now on, it's ALL about me! It's about time!

(c) Dave Luis - 19 March 2007 - All Rights Reserved

African Sunrise

2007-03-12T10:58:00.000+02:00

Rising, bidden by the bloody bladder, at some ungodly hour (circa 6-something-ish ay-em!) I staggered through to the W.C. to sort the problem out - and was witness to the most splendid sight - the sun rising over Johannesburg , and the east. Epiphanies are funny things, and hit at the most inopportune of moments - I was now faced with the need to bean (well, I couldn't well say pea, now could I?) and the need to snap the glorious sight laid out, it seemed, specially for me!

So, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a certain amount of pain, I snatched up my camera and snapped the glorious sight. Eyeing out my snappiwork, I thought it a tad unfocused - but that was just me being half-asleep, right? So off I went to do what it is young men (of which I am one) do in the W.C. at sparrow-fart in the morning and went back to bed.

Waking at a more human hour of ten-something and then some, I downloaded what I thought was going to be the most awesome sunrise pic - only to find it's as blurry as my grasp on capital gains tax (or any tax, for that matter). I can make only one conclusion from this disturbing sight - and that is, like me, my trusty Canon camera is a night-owl too, and needs a long time to wake up in the morning before being asked to do such irksome things as snap sunrises and such.

I've attached the pic for your edification. Squint your eyes, yawn and it should become clearer. If not, just look at it when you wake up tomorrow morning and you'll get the general effect!

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

H&M Madge? Sooo last season!

2007-02-04T05:07:00.000+02:00

(Her Madgesty in H&M trench-coat - so very, very last season - quite apres-garde, n'est-ce pa?)

Reveal It, that icon of exclusive celebrity news, was where I read that Madonna is to be H&M's icon for their new Devil Wears Prada beige trench-coat. I expect droves of women - hordes of them - swarms even - to don said trench-coat as a result.

What mad, foolish, fashion followers they all are. Sheep, every last one of them! Oh they want shooting they really do! Fashion icons (comme moi) lead - we don't follow. It's true. How do I know it? Because I bought the very same trench-coat as is now being touted as to die for, from Harvey Nichols, cut by Diesel, last year.

Madonna, dah-link, love your look! Hope you win!(moi, last season - so avante garde it's scary)

Adopting The Cause

2007-01-31T00:25:00.000+02:00

Catholic adoption agencies in the UK have been forced to comply with government rulings with regards to the placement of children with gay couples, which they previously have refused to do on the grounds of their religious teachings.

I started out writing a piece about this yesterday but found that I argued the point to such a degree that I actually ended up changing my own mind - resulting in me having the polar opposite view to when I started penning the tirade.

You see, I am against any kind of forcing and oppression - so I was against forcing the Catholic church to go against their very nature, because as a gay man I've been privy to exactly that sort of treatment before, and it just breeds resentment and hatred.

But the more I wrote, the more I realised that if some measure was not taken, then the Catholic church would continue to ostracise, criticise and oppress gay people. Years of debate, revolution, riots and progression has done nothing to bring tolerance and understanding to the church.

As the gay problem is still seen as the gay problem and not that we are normal people in every respect and the church continues to wallow in it's extremely outmoded and intolerant outlook, it has brought about this castigation, this enforcement, itself.

The world and its citizens is a dynamic, evolutionary place, where progression is made though learning, understanding, tolerance and acceptance. Intolerance and inflexibility such as the catholic church's, leads to heavy-handed tactics and change under duress.

Anyone who knows me well will know that you could do worse than to have me as a parent. I have seven nieces and nephews and my siblings wouldn't think twice about leaving their children in my care. My friends between them have a dozen kids, and I don't think any one of them would quesgtion my parenting skills. Whom I chose to love does not make me a bad candidate for raising a child.

I regret that the church has to be prescribed to and told what to do, but it is through their own doing, and we're tired of being told we're bad people.

Churches would have me kept well away from children based on my sexuality as it is not a good model for them to aspire to and goes against their religious beliefs.

The stability and love I could offer a child is not even regarded for a moment.

What I could give a child - any one of my nieces and nephews and the children of my friends will all attest to this - is beyond measure, and certainly overrides any arguement that my being gay can produce.

I feel very strongly that the church has been forced to do something that goes against their nature, but it is, for once, for a much better, human outcome.

I expect these two pictures will cause some to be offended - hopefully some debate will be sparked rather than a tirade of abuse and from that debate, tolernace, understanding, progression.

Announcing Rothko Red

2007-01-28T11:48:00.000+02:00

The standard of blogging has just been raised several notches today with the publishing of Rothko Red. Not only is it well-written, thought-provoking and insightful, the premier article features me. How much more fabulous can you get? I'm now the subject if not of a blog, then it's memorable launch.

The author of this most auspicious work is my good mate David Stockwell, accessory to my crimes against society, nature and good coiffure here in London and his oeuvre details some of the less shocking facts of our farewell dinner last night in Kimpton, Hampshire. A keen photographer, he has also published some of the more decent pictures on his Flickr gallery.

Rothko Red. Auspicious. That's me - that's Rothko Red.

Snow Queen!

2007-01-25T08:51:00.000+02:00

MY FIRST SNOW! Damn - it took 32 years (no jokes now!) and it looked like Dubya had stuffed up the climate to such an extent I'd not get to see it even in the UK - a quintessentially snowy place, donchernow!

So there I am, ensconced in Hampshire, taking two weeks out from Life In General at my mate Mel's place, and, insomniac that I am, I only went to bed around 5am this morning - the usual bedtime thanks to my new hobby (insomnia, fool!) and was presently woken at 8am by Mel & Cara who knew I'd never seen snow before, so thought it ok to to wake me from my corpse-like sleep (because once you've hit the sack and fallen asleep you DO sleep like a baby - minus the crying and pooping in your pants!) Anyway, all excited like, at the prospect of my FIRST snow, I dashed outside, couldn't get out there fast enough...not thinking that I was "improperly attired" for the main event....so there I was, jeans, t-shirt and SOCKS in the snow. Brilliant!

To be fair it wasn't very much snow, but it was cold enough to be felt and wet enough (although strangely dry feeling) to render my socks sodden and frozen! So I took them off long enough to pose for a couple of pics - had to give in to that poseur in me (yes he is still there after all these years!). I should be able to feel my feet again next week some time.

I am no longer a snow virgin!

Cheers London

2007-01-23T03:59:00.000+02:00

Day 84/365: Cheers London
this part of my adventure has ended and a new chapter is starting back in south africa london is home to me a new h ome full of new friends but made home by the many old fr iends who’ve made this their home as well and that has tr ansformed an alien city into a welcoming new friend full of places to explore and things to show me from the narrow streets of soho to the expanse of hyde park from the late n ights at two brewers to the early mornings on the tube from silent hordes on the trains to the incessantly gabby cabbie s from the northern leafy suburbs around stanmore to the cobbled walks along the thames this city is now like an old friend and a lusty lover that leaves me enthralled and app eals to my senses in every way from the sordid and anony mous intimacies in brixton to the intellectual introspections brought on by moments of solitude midst the throngs on p icadilly and the lyrical seductions of the nights at barcode in vauxhall and the elevating experiences had in the west end london is my mistress and my muse my utopia and al so my dystopia where my creativity thrives and my indepe ndence soars alongside my dependence and my foibles a re more present and my strengths more vivid and all at on ce there is in me that this feeling is more than just one of f amiliarity this is something profound and deep and more t han a place to call home this beguling wonderful seductive lonely crowded grey breathing beast is the place i belong

All trains go to Brixton

2007-01-22T03:11:00.000+02:00

you know those times after a good party when you're on your way home but things just don't focus, so you pour all your energy into focusing on the salient points that will guide you home and get you there safely because that's the only way you'll manage the only way you'll see yourself safely home although safely is subjective so really just as long as you make it through the front door whatever happens after that is just fine this was one of those all I could see was the train board saying all trains go to brixton brixton where's that is it close is it in the right direction can I get home oh god let me sleep

Celebrity Big Brother - Who's Racist?

2007-01-18T06:35:00.000+02:00

There is massive debate, discussion and ire at the alleged racist treatment of Shilpa Shetty in the Celebrity Big Brother house. Claims have been made that at least four of the housemates, Jade Goody, Jack Tweedy, Jo O'Meara and Danielle Lloyd have made racist remarks about Shilpa.

According to the BBC website, things went from bad to worse when the following was said:

"Following a discussion the group had with Shetty about how long it took to cook a chicken, Goody, O'Meara and Lloyd decided she had made them all ill.

"No wonder I keep getting the s***s," commented O'Meara.

Others complained that Shetty had touched housemates' food with her hands after she picked up morsels from people's plates.

Lloyd said: "You don't know where those hands have been."

Following another meal, Shetty poured left-over chicken soup down the Big Brother toilet - much to the disgust of the others, who felt chicken bones could cause a blockage.

"Why didn't it just go down the sink?" asked O'Meara. "She grates me so badly when she does things like that. What a stupid thing to do."

Tweedy suggested Shetty should pick the bones out with her teeth, receiving the reply: "There's a lot more I want to do with my teeth."

The things said can most certainly be seen as incendiary, but I think it's a far cry form racism. I've been on the receiving end of "Don't know where your hands have been" when cooking and choosing to use my hands rather than a knife to scrape the food into the pan. This comment was from my white friend to me, so obviously not racist. Just because a white person says this to an Asian person, does NOT automatically make it a racist put-down!

Agreed, there is a lot of bullying going on, but that's what happens in the Big Brother house. The constant proximity and forces extremes in peoples personalities to come into play, and factions are formed - we've seen it time and again. In situations like that, folks draw close to those most similar to them - and in this household, the common bimbo is at a premium and therefore they become the biggest and strongest group.

You can argue until you are blue in the face about the bullying - it's an unavoidable factor of the contrived situation that is the Big Brother household. Racial bullying is something that should not be tolerated, but I don't think that racial bullying is what is happening in the house, and if you take a little time to watch how the contestants interact you would see how both parties provoke each other.

I wonder, though, if the situation was reversed, and Shilpa and two or three other Asians were attacking Jade, if there would be as many complaints or accusations of of racism. It seems to me that any time a white person is anything less than uber-accommodating to folk of other ethnic groups, they are instantly branded as racist. But so many black 'artists' incite racism and murder in their 'music' and yet they are lauded as symbols taking a stand against oppression. Anytime a white person is selected for a sports team or a dream job above someone of any other ethnic group (minority or not) the airwaves ring to the cries of racism.

There is certainly a case to be made for racism AGAINST white people in that we are being dictated to on how we should behave, what to say, how to act, and that we should only expect to come second in everything because it's time for black, Asian et al to take their rightful place as winners, job-takers and sports heroes - not because of their skills - but because of their skin colour. This is no different to the old apartheid regime of South Africa, where people were awarded jobs and rights because they were white.

Two wrongs don't make a right, sadly, and Shilpa Shetty herself has offered a statement saying that the incidents were not racially based. The public, however, 33,000 of them so far, have that indicated that they believe otherwise.

A point we should note though, is that incidents like this result in national debate, and a cultural analysis. Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother is shown only in the UK, but people as far afield as India and South Africa are furiously debating the goings-on. Any form of debate, and a nation's evaluation of their racial harmony - or disharmony - is good. A nation learns about itself through these dynamic upheavals, and what England is busy learning is that there is no real racial harmony within it's borders, and that there is a lot of ill-feeling and distrust among it's citizens. Hopefully what it does learn is that white people are on the receiving end of racial abuse and bullying just as much as any other ethnic group.

Ideally, there won't be some PC solution which will just sweep the obvious cultural differences under the carpet, but rather, some understanding will be thrashed out that can respect cultural differences and through familiarisation with the different cultures, achieve some level of tolerance. But as long as playing the racial trump card is the reserve of non-whites, that day is far off. I remain a firm fan of Jade Goody, and reckon she while she is common as muck, she is as honest as the day is long, and fights for what she believes is right. There is not a malign bone in her body.

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

50 More Things...

2007-01-18T03:26:00.000+02:00

I previously posted a list of "100 things you never knew about me...", inspired by Jane's list. Marelise challenged me to write a list of 100 things I want to do before I die. The list became a little lame so I shortened it to 50 things. So, in no particular order, here are

50 Things I Want To Do Before I Die:

I want to hear a set by Don Wildman, in front of tens of thousands of people again
I want to summit the Eiffel Tower and shout "Chere Paris - Devinez Quoi?! Riens!" from the top
Win a gold medal at fencing
But a new out-the-box car
Go to Hong Kong and stand in front of Buddha
Watch the sunset from Lion's Head in Cape Town
Meet Terry Pratchett for lunch
Teach my nieces and Jane's sons how to fence
Run into Angela somewhere exotic
Party with Paul in New York, at Twilo
Have a column in a weekly newspaper
Own a little bar on Camps Bay, but not work there.
Sleep with James Small (after he's showered)
Do lunch at Harvey Nichs with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley
Drive a Jaguar E-Type roadster through the English countryside
Climb Ayer's Rock
Experience the Aurora Borealis
See a meteor shower
Fly in a private jet
Stand at the face of a glacier
Be hugged by a chimpanzee
Create a dish that's served in restaurants around the world
Buy a pair of Manolo Blahniks for men
Design my own house
Own a cabriolet again
Meet Sarah Ferguson and chat about being the black sheep.
Visit Columbia without the craving.
Walk on Blouberg Beach with Lynn
Create a piece of art that is displayed in a museum.
Write an anthology
Learn how to compose music with PC software
Master Photoshop
Go to Durban again.
Go on a Twister Tour holiday in the US and chase a tornado (or be chased by one)
Dance in the rain on the beach
Go on Big Brother
Attend my nieces' graduations
Make a speech at my brothers' weddings
Drive a car at 300km/h
Have a shirt and suit tailor-made
See an eruption on Mt. Etna
Taste my sister's Malva pudding!
Be in an earthquake and survive!
Meet Jade Goody for dinner and drinks and a dance!
Be there as a hurricane makes landfall
Have a cheese platter at Cottage Fromage in Stellenbosch
Act in Catherine Tate's show.
Finish writing the play with Christopher!
Watch the fencing finals at the Olympics
Eat a banana bread

Hit n Tryst

2007-01-18T02:36:00.000+02:00

It was supposed to be a home-wrecking. It was supposed to be dirty, extra-marital sex that would have me and my paramour excommunicated from the church, the country and the bridge club. It was, sadly, none of these things.

Chris' boyf recently moved back to Lisbon and they are maintaining a Long-Distance Relationship, because obviously LDR's work, don't they? Anyway, Chris' boyf, X (because his family don't know he's a great big poof at age 34) was previously not my biggest fan - he thought I was trying to steal Chris from him, which of course is NOT true (and he would accuse me of such low standards??? hehehe sorry Chris!) but then he met me and declared me safe, not a threat, due to my 'campness'!!!!! I mean really! Have you ever?! Me?!!?!?! CAMP?!?!?!?!?!?! OK I admit the multiple exclamatio-question things are not as butch as they should be. But my God I am NOT camp!

Needless to say, since THAT comment I've flirted OUTRAGEOUSLY with Chris (he's known as S&M Chris in our circle because of his propensity to don leather, rubber and chains and attend London's more outro homogatherings. I never intended to sleep with Chris, but I wanted Ru...oh...I mean X...to realise that I could have Chris as and when I wanted.

On Sunday, Christopher had a birthday lunch, to which Chris was invited and in our discussion about his recent visit to X in Lisbon, he told me he is still totally devoted to his boyf. On another landmass. Millions of miles away. Now THAT was an invitation IF ever, for fate to step in. So, I graciously (because I am full of grace) accepted Chris' dinner invitation (much like the scene in Death Becomes Her where Goldie gets Meryl to invite her over for dinner) and I planned to get Chris deliciously drunk and then have my way most horribly with him. Fate is a bastard though, playing chess while we think we're about to hold all the cards....

It seems that X should not have worried (I don't know why I am concerned about hiding his identity...) because even though Chris got deliciously, guard-droppingly drunk, he confessed he would NOT be doing the dirty with me because I was too fat. His words. Not mine. In his efforts to make right his social gaffe he uttered things like "even though you were a complete porker I would have slept with you when we first met but now I know you too well and we're like close friends". He said a lot of other stuff my ears failed to hear out of self-preservation.

Being the 'gracious' and 'graceful' person that I am, I of course let him wallow in his comments before resuming the conversation on less incendiary topics, but dropping self-deprecating remarks EVERY sentence that soon had dear Chris squirming second to none until at the very last I thought the poor boy might actually burst into flame, so red with embarrassment was he.

If anyone thought I'd be mortified and about to hop on a treadmill and ride the damn thing to Queen Maudland (it's a real place - look it up) they're sadly mistaken. I know I am not fat. I am moderately well-built. AND some sickos, like Chris, like twinks that are Mary-Kate Olsen thin. So, being a normal size, I accept I would not fit into Chris' criteria (or jeans, for that matter).

At least I don't have to rub my ribs to feel anything, mid-coitus!

Menopause: The Musical

2007-01-15T00:22:00.000+02:00

My friends were recently amused to hear that Menopause: The Musical is coming to the London stage. Apparently they saw it in San Francisco and it was dreadful, a melange of dreadful lyrical rip-offs and embarrassing female admissions!

But never mind all that - I want to ask why there is the need to have all these acutely corporeal productions? While Menopause is packing it's trunk to head across the pond to us here in the UK, the Vagina Monologues is touring the country circuit, foisting it's labial queens on all and sundry. What is the process or the principle or the movement that saw fit to unleash these things on us? I've seen neither so I acknowledge my tenuous grasp on the subject of either play, but I gather from the titles it's not too high-brow. Is it a post-feminist attitude, that thought one day, it would be great to let the vagina have it's say? Maybe it's just pure feminist, nothing post about it? Hey I'm all for the feminist movement - but isn't it a little past tense now, like Stonewall for us queers? Pride is all very good and well, but doesn't it go too far sometimes? I wonder.

One thing is for sure, this is not done in the spirit of equality. No sirree. This is blatant sexism this is. Only because it is of a female nature, has this filth been allowed to be produced, and in turn been so successful. I am sure of it! Were either of these productions to be done in exploration of men's issues you can bet your bottom dollar that they'd have been turned down in the conceptual phase and the productions would never have seen the light of day. "The Penis Poems" wouldn't have sold a single ticket, except maybe to the most desperate of fags. "Premature Ejaculation - The Drama" would go before it came. "Impotence: The Musical" would have been a sorry attempt, with little resultant interest.

There is a band of women out there riding the crest of pro-female everything. Taking chances. Knowing that whatever they do they'll not be criticised because after all it's Outmoded and Misogynistic to challenge anything a woman does, to deny her her rights, as it were. A man may never say no to a woman. He'd be blasted for being neolithic in his thought and the worst of chauvinists if he did.

So, lads, gird your loins - we'll not be seeing "Beer Gut - The Panto" anytime soon, but no doubt "Boobjobs Awry: The Roadshow" is not too far in the future....

(c) Dave Luis 2007 - All Rights Reserved

Grey Matter

2007-01-08T00:35:00.000+02:00

A cold, wintery London morning and I find myself, suddenly awake, in the bathroom at Christopher’s house. The suddenness of my waking was a surprise, as I usually ease my consciousness into the day, so that, having risen bodily at seven, my mind achieved alertness by lunch-time. The reason for my instant awareness was not that I was in a strange house – I’d been staying with Christopher for 6-odd weeks and the house was less strange now than it had been at first and I could confidently navigate my way to the bathroom and back without a detour through the Koi pond nine times out of ten.

No, the reason for my shocking reveille was not situation at all. It was the sudden and vicious appearance of a large grey hair. Now this is a terrible thing to happen when you have a mouth full of electric toothbrush and it was only by extreme gag-reaction that I did not swallow my toothbrush, hand and arm up to the elbow – truly a feat of dental heroics!

Plastered there, on my pate, as large as life, lay a single strand of hair so grey as to resemble the London fogs of yore, and as thick as to tether ships together. How could this be? Surely a travesty as mind-bendingly huge as that didn’t happen overnight except in the most Hollywood of horror stories? Shouldn’t I have been weaned onto grey-hairedness by a single, out-of-sight strand, lightly dusted with grey, and not this bleak highway to decrepit ruin?

Now let’s be clear about one thing: I am not vain. No, really. Most of my friends are well used to the indecencies of the odd grey hair, many of them are younger than I, so I have been aware, if not exactly expecting, that my first grey visitor should be visiting soon. I say visiting because I planned to evict as soon as I first met my first grey member. But this was no little weekend visitor – this was a harbinger of decay and the devastation of old age. It was so huge and so prominently located that there was no way it could be removed without leaving a scar, a bald patch and an invitation to see me as balding. I may entertain the notion of a receding hairline, but I most certainly am not balding!

Faced with this grey revulsion I had a choice – face my public as a benign Cruella de Ville or go bald, and in so doing bring disquiet to the warring factions that are my forehead and my hairline. Well, Cruella de Ville may have a figure to die for, but that wasn’t enough for me to do a creditable impersonation of her in public, so, with shaking hands – shaking I might add, out of fear, not some age-related malady – I reached up to the offending lock, gripped most forcefully and yanked the blighter out.

It was surprisingly painless and looking at my supposedly now-diminished ursine tundra I saw no appreciable gap through which my head could make a break and run with it. Puzzled, I gazed down at the offending strand in an effort to work out why I’d felt no pain at our parting. It was a feather. A tiny little grey feather, from my pillow. So small as to render which ever bird had offered it up for my sleeping pleasure as quite flightless I am sure. Not a grey hair at all. Not one of my hairs. Not a hair at all but a feather. A simple feather

So much more effective than an alarm clock, as it turns out, at getting me 100% awake

Time

2007-01-07T10:54:00.000+02:00

Funny how back in South Africa I found people’s drive to do up their homes and spend so much time on their personal space and comfort a dreadful anchor that weighed heavily on the sense of adventure and progression. That in itself is strange because I myself am nothing if not a creature of habit and bien installé in my own comfort zone.

My first year in London, bedding down in the company’s flat on the banks of the Thames did little to shake up my concept of home comforts. While my flatmates were at times oiks of the most inharmonious kind, given their varying degrees of domesticity – on both extremes – some were hermit-like and as filthy as you’d expect any vagrant to be, while others completely anal in their drive for domestic order. I fluctuated somewhere in between, my moods defining which side of the happy medium I’d be. The space and luxury of that apartment made us, me, overlook most of the comforts I’d sacrificed on my sojourn étrange, in the face of all that was new and wondrous in my situation.

Change is always cruel Fate’s vogue, and so with changing fortunes we’ve moved on and out of that desirable pied a terre, gone our separate ways. Some, like me have had to beg the charity of others to provide a roof over our heads and it is now especially evident what I’ve given up to be here.

Perhaps it is that I am not the usual youthful foreign adventurer, but marginally more mature and therefore more set in my ways at 32. As I’ve said, I’ve permanent residence in my comfort zones. Living as I have been, for the cast 6 weeks out of my suitcases plonked in the corner on the floor of Christopher’s front room, bedding down on an old mattress, and eating when I can afford to, or when charity invites me to her inconstant table I am now so acutely aware that there is no place anywhere in this world I can call mine. No place to retreat to at the end of the day that is mine and mine alone. Nowhere I can dress up to my tastes, nowhere to hide when life gets too much. That’s a pretty scary thought.

As life’s adventure rolls on, dragging us all along in different states of play, it’s time for a regroup and a drawing near of all my comforts. My current chapter is closing and a new one beginning….

Beautiful Angle

2007-01-03T06:14:00.000+02:00

I've really taken to photography in a big way, and my Flickr Pro account inow has over 1500 photos on it. I have discovered I am not the only one who likes taking pics at an unusual angle but I have been frustrated that the existing groups have a daily posting limit of around 5 photos. I take at tleast that amount daily. So I set up a group of my own to administer (quite a big thing, really, when my computer skills are right up there with my brick laying and extreme ironing skills...)

The group is named Beautiful Angle, and I have set no daily limit. I invited my contacts and asked them to invite some of their contacts - in less than 24 hours, my group has attracted 74 members and has 292 pictures posted to it (ok - so 132 WERE mine!)

Take a couple of minutes to glance through some really amazing shots of everyday objects and buildings taken at unusual angles, rendering them as fantastic artworks and tricks of the eye!

The link is: http://www.flickr.com/groups/beautifulangle/pool/

TwoDoubleOhSeven

2007-01-03T06:04:00.000+02:00

Well, the new year is here, with a little noise and some fuss. We had a blow-out at Christopher and Matthew's place, where I am staying for the time being. Christopher invited a number of people from the neighbourhood who sing in his choir, the Collier's Wood Chorus, along with friends etc. The evening started off sedately, as we are all Respectable Adults, of course...until one James Marsten arrived and he and I made Eye Contact, with a capital E.C. Of course, I have no clue what the way to a boy's heart is, but I do know t he way to his morals is through drink and suggestive eye-contact and lugubrious double entendre. So, at around three a.m. when the party was winding down severely, James and I hopped it in a cab to Crash in Vauxhall, where we danced the night away, returning chez Killerby-Marks at around 6a.m.. James left at around 9:30...I'll leave it up to you to fill in the intervening three and-a-half hours.

As far as resolutions go, mine have.

I Was Here When Saddam Died

2006-12-30T11:27:00.000+02:00

It's 09:27am, GMT, and I am sitting in the front room of Christopher and Matthew's home, which has been my pied-a-terre this past month. I've just read on BBC New online about Saddam's hanging in Iraq and wanted to note my time and place, for future "where were you when..." references. According to the article, he was executed at 03:00 GMT. I was in Kimpton in Hampshire then, fast asleep, when Saddam's weight stretched the rope. I'd like to say I feel something, some relief at the riddance of a madman and a murderer, but I don't. For everything that he was, he was so far removed from my experience as to be nothing more than a news piece, a headline and a brief topic of conversation t hat usually bored me. Strange then, that I feel the urge to note his death.

View the exectution here.

Only A Winter's Wail!

2006-12-25T10:59:00.000+02:00

Oh. My. Dog! So there I am, pissed as a coot, as one is, three sheets to the wind on more than half a bottle of Jack and Chateau Neuf du Pape, lying in bed with Mel killing me softly with David Bloody Essex and his "song" 'Only A Winter's Tale' and telling me not to laugh and to have bloody respect.

All I can say is:

"You're flapping, honey! Tone it down a notch!"