Port Elizabeth season opens

The fireworks at the opening of the season just get better and better ... take a look at this photo by The Herald photographer Fredlin Adriaan ... and there was half an hour of brilliant flashes like this in the night sky at Shark Rock pier here in Port Elizabeth last night. The Herald reported today that there were 100,000 people and I could well believe it. The weather was perfect, around 22 degrees C and only a tiny breeze.

Oh, and Freshly Ground, the group performing after the fireworks, were fabulous. Port Elizabeth rocks!

Tip for next time though: take the Schoenies road round to Summerstrand, or leave home before 7pm or you won't get there by the time the show starts at 8.30.

Do you still send "real" Christmas cards?

You might have read Jeremy Maggs’s column in The Herald today, about the demise of Christmas cards.

That really does bring back fond memories and I suspect by the time our kids are adults Christmas cards will be seen in the same light as gramophone records, those dial-up telephones with holes for your fingers (when did you last see one of those?) and other quaint relics of the technological dark ages.

This year I’ve had heaps of Christmas cards by e-mail, and I suppose I could string them up on a bit of red ribbon and hang them over my desk at work, but they are just not as festive as the old-fashioned variety. Plus our office printer is only black and white.

One NGO in Port Elizabeth, sent me a lovely card, in PowerPoint form, signed by a totally different charity organisation. Now, I’m not sure if the sender had Alzheimer’s approaching (one of them was, in fact, the Algoa Bay Council for the Aged), or if it was merely someone too hasty to forward a cute card and not bothering to change the details.

That’s the problem with the electronic version, it’s just too easy to send, hence you get sent cards by the most obscure folk whom you don’t really know, and you send them right back.

Here is the one I’m planning to send out just before I go on leave ...

Shoot out in Central Port Elizabeth

Today I have something slightly more serious to post. The Herald building is on the edge of the inner city of Port Elizabeth and most of us here at Newspaper House are used to strolling down Govan Mbeki Avenue in our lunch break, either to pop into the bank, or pay an account, or browse through the shoes (Yes, there are many suburban folk who shudder at the thought of dipping a white toe into “Africa” but in case they haven’t noticed, we actually do live in Africa and not lower London or western Washington. Get with the plan, folk.)
Anyway, yesterday was hot and on my way back from town I idly looked at the long queue at KFC, thinking how delicious one of their soft serves would be, but was it really worth that long queue when I probably should have already been back at my desk, slaving away at next week’s La Femme, when all of a sudden, a crowd of folk interrupted my reverie and came swarming round the corner and swept me off deep into Traduna Mall.
“Run, run, sister, run!" shrieked one mama, pushing me out of Govan Mbeki. “They are shooting!”
She grabbed me by the arm and yanked me into a shoe shop (never an entirely unpleasant experience for me, I must confess) and told me the buzz was that someone had tried to hijack a car outside in the street.
The police, or whoever, let off a few shots - which was why the passers-by and shoppers were running in terror. A few minutes later, when things quietened down, I gingerly stepped back out to investigate and found two policemen waving their revolvers over two very ordinary looking guys lying flat on the grit, arms spread, next to a dented car.
I decided to forgo the ice-cream - it seemed a bit trivial after the terror and pandemonium – and hot-foot it back the few hundred metres or so to The Herald in case the news desk wanted to follow up for a pic or a story.
Which they did, sort of, expressing polite but mild interest. The problem was that it was too small, really, to go into a newspaper in today’s South Africa.
“It’ll just be a ‘short’,” warned the news ed.
“It was all over by the time I got there,” said the photographer, who got sent out.
"No one was killed, or even hurt,” said another.
Another day in sunny South Africa. Darn, and I missed out on that ice-cream ...

Light bulbs are banned

What a bright idea
The European Union has agreed to ban the traditional lightbulb from the end of next year. They will be replaced with energy-efficient bulbs, and the first to go will be the ever-so-useful 100-watt bulb. After that, the ban will be extended to lower wattages, with a complete ban of the familiar incandescent bulb by 2012. And, I am sure, with our Eskom hassles, South Africa will no doubt in time follow suit.

This has huge implications for joke writers around the world who will be deprived of the familiar “how many (insert group you wish to insult) does it take to change a light bulb?” After all, you’ll hardly ever change one of these bulbs, because they last for ages.

Energy-saving lightbulbs can help us with climate change and household bills, with even one bulb saving up to as much as R900 worth of electricity over its flickering lifespan.

Politically correct though they may be, however, they just don’t have the same comedic potential somehow. So, for old times sake, here is my personal fave (and, no, it's not a blonde joke):

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one, but the light bulb must really want to change.

Please do send in yours, specially if it has a lekker South African flavour.

Take that you Bratz

Come on Barbie, let's go party ...

If you get The Herald, you can read in La Femme on Wednesday how Barbie has beaten the Bratz. And for those of you who don’t have pre-school daughters: that’s Mattel’s Barbie doll winning a court battle against MGA’s Bratz dolls.

The end result means that you won’t be able to buy Bratz anymore, because Barbie has knocked the usurpers off the perch that was hers for so long. Barbie, in case you didn’t know, is 40 something, and the Bratz only seven years old – probably the same age as their biggest fans.

"Few parents will shed a tear at this turn of events," wrote The Telegraph reporter Sarah Vine. "Despite her reputation as an anti-feminist fantasy, Barbie’s plastic smile and unfeasible chest-to-waist ratio are as nothing faced with the unalloyed trashiness of the Bratz dolls."

She continued in the same biting vein: “Barbie may have ridiculous breasts but at least she is not parcelled up to look like jailbait while the four core Bratz characters, with their ostentatiously ‘street’ styling and abrasive attitude, are the Pussycat Dolls of the toy world.

"Overtly sexualised, fashion and fame-obsessed, the principal Bratz pursuits are dressing up, going out, parading about in front of a microphone and doing their make-up. They come pre-daubed in garish eyeshadow and mascara, with glossy, collagen-enhanced lips and distinctly minxy, come-hither expressions. They make Barbie look like a Sunday school teacher.Infuriatingly, little girls love them – in much the same way as little girls used to love Barbie."
You must have seen them on the shelves ... Barbie mermaids and princesses compete with Bratz who look more Paris and Britney than Pocohantas and Cinderella. Both are vacuous, but for me the scales tilt in favour of old-fashioned fairy tales and away from cheap glamour and empty celebrity.

Who knows, though, in another 40 years maybe the Bratz will seem as wholesome as bran muffins ... and Barbie will be pushing up daisies or steering her zimmer frame around an old age home.

Conceivably, Mattel, having won its court case, should own the Bratz concept which would make Barbie and the girls ... hmm, new best friends?

Not Rudolph

Now this reindeer-shaped coat rack may seem wacky but look closely and you'll see that it is actually quite a practical item ... if Port Elizabeth’s Christmas Shop sold these, I would want to buy one.

They come from a suitably seasonal country ... and I love their name. Icelandic graphic designer Ingibjörg Hanna calls the rack Not Rudolph. As her website says, , Ingibjörg "loves to reawake the child inside us all" with her playful and functional creations.

She also has a series of coat hangers shaped like birds. Her “raven” series consists of three different types, one mounted from the ceiling, a standard coat hanger and one that is able to clip trousers or skirts. Iceland may be bankrupt, but it has some bright sparks living there.

Real Beauty

The many faces of Eve

I was up in Johannesburg last weekend and the friend I was visiting took me to the Goodman Gallery to show me an exhibition by Jodi Bieber titled Real Beauty. Wow, what an eye opener ... it consisted of massive photographs of South African women in their underwear but these were not the young and beautiful sort that normally grace the fashion pages of La Femme.

No, no, no, they were all ages and sizes and shades, and some were ancient and wrinkled, others flabby and veined, or just wildly overweight. What they all had in common was that they were not models but average women, just like you and me.

You can find out why former press photographer Bieber chose this theme in her press release here. It's worth reading.

Now, when I asked a colleague to scan in the exhibition photo for me to use on this blog he did a double take. After all, in the media we don’t usually publish photographs of people semi-nude unless they are young and beautiful ... it was a sobering thought.

But, you know what? After I had looked around the exhibition, I discovered I could see real beauty in many of them. Every woman had something special, a spark of something. Courageous, certainly, to show so much of their physical imperfections and yes, they were each, in their own way, beautiful.

Viva real beauty!