September 2002 Archives

The Smirnoff International Comedy Festival is on in Cape Town. Go see it!!! Especially the Danger Zone where two of the best comic minds we've ever had will be flying the flag and getting the words to "Nkosi Sikelele" hopelessly ballsed up. Chris McEvoy and Mel Miller are good mates and fantastic stand-ups, so make sure you show them due respect. Or Mel will kick your ass and Chris will scare your children.

Irritainment (-n.): A word for the kind of thing on telly that you hate, but can't stop watching, because you're lying on the remote and you're too goeffed to move. (See also - Anything on SABC) That's how I ended up watching the world summit for the sustainable development of more world summits.

Bozos descended on us by every conceivable, polluting means of transportation, forests full of pamphlets in hand. Palestinians and the Israelis played "My God's bigger than your God" instead of getting on with the task of punching out even noisier Hare Krishna's. Krishna must be deaf. Mugabe lectured everyone he hadn't already killed and Greenpeace snuck up on a nuclear power station outhouse and gave it reiki. The winds of change were blowing up a gale force, grade-A, shitstorm. Yet the moment delegates (so named because they did bugger all for themselves) oozed into the shopping malls, there were no problems at all. There's religion and there's politics and then there's the really important stuff like Armani.

At least South Africans added a dash of rhythm to their outrage. We don't so much march as boogie. Toi-toi and kwaito are so close to each other that the American delegation didn't know when it was being protested and when it was being entertained. The Americans put a brave face on it, but, by the end of the twentieth press conference where they were harangued for not pitching up so that they could be told to piss off, I thought I lip-read one of them whispering the command, "Nuke everybody!", into his cufflink. Luckily, somebody's system is running on Microsoft so the whole idea crashed.