29th April 2013 - Gauteng

Roy and I have just returned from the National Yearling sales in the Germiston area of Gauteng, aka the Transvaal of the previous Apartheid rule. Bloodstock SA had invited guests and prospective buyers with free accomodation & five packets of condoms at the picturesque Emperors Palace Casino Hotel alongside the serene landscape of the Oliver Tambo International Airport, & hosted by a slim brunette with a fixation for the pious.

Jeffrey 'Garmin' Dlamini before his audition

After a wonderful day's racing at Turffontein Racecourse, situated next to the remains of the once flourishing gold mine dumps previously owned, managed & operated unilaterally by Anglo, we were kindly offered a lift home by our hosts in their crowded new customised Datsun ZX, courtesy of the Japanese Dept of Trade & African Exploitation. Our driver, Jeffrey 'Garmin' Dlamini, with his sixth sense of perspective & orientation that only a seasoned pick-pocket artist could possibly have, decided to take us through a cultural African odyssey whilst meandering through the seedier parts of Downtown Jeppe. The local taxis complete disregard for, and total dismissal of the South African highway code, led to our Jeffrey eventually auditioning for the Force India Formula One racing team as an experimental test driver. 

and after !!!

During the audition ...

Species of the night

With the sunroof ajar, we hurtled down narrow side roads at speeds beyond safe as the initial stages of hypothermia settled in & we were lulled into a state of semi-consciousness usually confined to the downward climb on Mount Everest. I barely had time to notice the African ladies of the night propping up the littered pavements with their flimsy lingerie imported from Vietnam, and with all sorts of glands & orifices clearly on display like a biology anatomy lesson and as authentic examples of the missing link from Darwin's anthropological expose, 'On the Origin of Species'. When we eventually stepped on to terra firma outside our hotel, we looked like a wide-eyed bunch of Don King impersonators & transformed Neanderthals imported from another time & place. Little did we realize that the fun had barely started.

Roy after the ride home

In the morning, we were rudely awakened to what I initially thought was champagne corks being let off by over exuberant revellers as they left the casino. The next rattle of automatic gun fire quickly dispelled any of those foolish ideas as I unwrapped myself from the extra length king size duvet on the back seat of the voiture and hid behind the central armrest. A group of gangsters had been foiled, and many of them decided to hotfoot it through the hotel parking lot to the accompaniment of an orchestra of AK47 rapid machine gun fire. The screams were starting to get to me until I realized that if was me and the early shift janitor tripping over one of the edentate car guards lying semi-comatose in the bushes after a healthy tip of a partially drunk bottle of Johnny Walker Black.

The car guard

I scrambled into the safety of the breakfast dining room to settle my nerves, and I was barely in to wolfing down my second mouthful of Eggs Benedict, when a group of Kevlar covered locals burst through the dining room doors babbling loudly in their native tongue like a troop of over-excited Mandarin monkeys in the middle of the Congo mating season, sending the international visitors to the carpeted floor like frightened rabbits at the finish of a Cornwall Beagle Hunt. The only thing missing was the pack of over-excited & partially rabid Beagle hounds who hadn't been fed properly since the previous Sunday, mostly due to the Head Huntsman being side-tracked by the amorous & decidedly lascivious advances of the ageing Lady Beaverbrook from the local manor.

Where's breakfast ?

Barely recovered from the breakfast festivities, and after a twenty minute session of gastric reflux in the hotel foyeur toilets, we rejoined Jeffrey for the short trip to the sales ground and a morning of abstract voyeurism rating various juvenile equine progeny according to their physical prowess & pedigree, or lack of it, or parts thereof. Inbetween discussions on the relative merits of anabolic doping in UK racing & whether owners should be allowed to nominate horses or accept with jockeys, or whether they should even be allowed in a racing yard at all, we waddled around the sales ground sampling wines from every conceivable vineyard in the Cape & beyond until we clearly forgot why we were at the sales in the first place. It was at that point, we all congregated at the main bar to drink ourselves into absolute oblivion whilst discussing the relative merits or othwerwise of even having a regulatory body for horseracing, never mind a testing protocol. Why mess with wealthy investors anyway seemed to be the final consensus. Afterall, we need their interest & investment as much as we need the air that we all breathe. And we certainly need their horses, in any form.

The man suspected of starting all the trouble

24th April 2013 - Pretoria

Ypiss-only

Roy and I have just returned from Municipal Headquarters in Pretoria via the new Gautrain line to Oliver Tambo before catching a Mango flight at the discounted price of R300, all subsidised by SAA, and, indirectly of course, by the national government, and indirectly again, by the South African taxpayer, and indirectly again we suppose, by mostly Caucasians. We had been asked to add comment to the ludicrous, but extremely accurate, allegations directed at wealthy business woman, Skinhead Ypiss-only, who is, unfairly I might add, currently being charged with numerous tax and tender fraud charges that have been steadily accumulating since independence in '94. 
She is being charged with raking in the 'lions share' of the lucrative eThekweni municipal contracts, close to 50% of the province's entire GDP, which might explain to some degree, why your rates & water bills have gone up tenfold in the last five years alone.

Cheap housing alternative proposed by Ypiss-only

Ransak Naidoo

The contracts were awarded in terms of section 36 of eThekwini man'age'ment policy that allows for previously underprivileged (the majority of the population, it seems) to pillage, plunder, loot and burgle any amount of tax payers' money at will, whether or not you passed matric. Our friend, Ypiss-only, whose company, Weheist Cleaning Maintenance Drop Toilets & Transport & Ancillaries, Etc, was awarded the latest Umlazi housing project, which incorporates a new system of cheaper housing using imported paper-mache from the Amazon via a native american Indian registered company owned by the Reddy's in Isipingo and transparent Namibian mud imported from another Reddy company based in Luanda, Angola, that also deals in Kimberley certified raw diamonds only...Hmm. City Treasurer, Ransak Naidoo, stated that the contracts were as a result of an out of court settlement as opposed to the usual kangaroo courts held around the 'sometime' shebeen made with Weheist.

Treachery and the brains trust

Skinhead...who the bloody hell is Skinhead?...has previously had a 2005 VAT conviction brushed under the carpet, along with Zuma's, with the dexterity of a Federer backhand. Talking about backhands, Skinhead has received contracts to the value of R445 million, and we feel that it is turning out to be a witch hunt of extreme proportions, with the partisan DA ward councillor suggesting that, like a tribal kya, where there is smoke there is fire - plenty of fire! The DA have taken a jaundiced view of the matter, saying that the Municipal Financial Act clearly states that a municipality may not do business with any individual who has a criminal record, but the city continues to flout the law primarily, we assume, because the majority would be excluded if they did not flout the law. The 'law' was written by Treachery Gumede many years ago from his jail cell on Robin Island where the meat of the South African constitution was originally formulated by the brains trust of the old guard ANC & with a little help from the Moscow University Department of Political Science & Communism, now located on the outskirts of Chernobyl. 

The head of department, Skrambled Dykotomy, has the dubious distinction of having two brains, apparently, and might help explain why his statue outside the buildings of parliament in Pretoria seems to have an overly enlarged head. On the otherhand, we are not sure why the statue of Thabo Mbeki has such an unusually small pea sized head. The fact that Jacob Zuma does not even appear to have a head, or at least not much of a neck, or an over-extended neck perhaps, is also an unknown. But then, did he pass his matric?

22nd April 2013 - Houghton, Gauteng

Stranded Swedes

Roy and I have just returned from downtown Houghton in Gauteng where we attended an inquiry on the totally missing funds of the South African Football Association (SAFA).The accusations of missing money had been levelled straight as an arrow, & initially delivered via a carrier pigeon shot down over his weekend mudhut, at the strangely named CEO, Dennis Mumble, once a famous public speaker at the second inaugural Toastmasters competition in Pilgrims Rest. The World Cup Committee spokesman, an understudy to Serve Platter, I M Korrupt, said that millions had been unaccounted for ('Eish! Howzat?'), and that the annual audit by KPMG showed irregularities last seen during Robert Mugabe's first international trip to Sweden when he commandeered the national carrier's entire Air Zimbabwe Boeing 737 fleet. Okay that was only two aircraft, but it did leave over two hundred stranded Swedish dignitaries attending the 'free Zimbabwe' elections to ensure that the locals had an elementary grasp of arithmetic & knew how to count from one to ten.
   

One of Dennis's new cars

When pressed to account for the seventeen brand new canary yellow Mercedes S series, AMG modified models, that were bought from his brother-in-law, Winston Stutter, in Patternoster, Dennis lamented that these were the only colors available. The SAFA President, Kisten M'harse Newattendant, berated the Olympic committee with the zest of an agitated chimpanzee at a Tennessee research lab on genetic engineering, gesticulating that they had not given them enough money to manage local football at 'the grass roots level', or for his new Nguni laden farm & sometime training ground on the periphery of Underberg in the Hlatikulu Valley. The fifty million rand budget had not stretched far enough to allow them to buy the new Volvo buses required to ferry in supporters from the poorer jurisdictions of South Africa as the buses required 4x4 modifications & bullet proofing to manouvre safely along the district untarred & potholed emasculated roads along the outlying areas of the Transkei & Lesotho, with the occasional detour to Windhoek when the driver fancied a frankfurter 'n sauerkraut roll as a snack.

Head of the Audit Team - Letmie Ckecitout

The legal administration team leader for KPMG, Letmie Ckecitout, had alluded to the fact that SAFA only had one and a half million left in the piggy bank, and that they had many commitments to meet, and many personnel to pay including all of King Zwelethini's extended family sired along the borders of Natal, Mpumalanga & the Northern Cape.  A former Scorpion judge, Handson Imbongi Bakhan, who has always advocated the death penalty by machine gun fire, was asked to arbitrate. When quizzed on what he thought of euthanasia he said that they were no different to the youth in Europe.

Balance of SAFA account

He thought that Nkandla would be better served for the future 'at grassroots level' as a youth backpackers lodge & suggested they converted the incendiary section into a pizza oven for cheaper meals. Dennis Mumble has been told in no uncertain terms that if South Africa did not get it's kraal together, there was every possibility that they would be expelled from FIFA or have to face the wrath of Handson Bakhan, an idiot not to be trifled with.

18th April 2013 - Ukraine

Roy and I have just returned from the Ukraine where we were invited to one of the regular social parties for mail order brides and beautiful partners of course. The old Soviet Union has realised that the ratio of ten to one is most appealing to American and British men who have failed dismally at love in their native countries. The romance tours that meander through many of the major cities are extremely popular and the one we were invited to is being held in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. I am seated next to a sweaty overweight American from the Manitou islands on Lake Michigan, who’s nervous tick is as pronounced and obvious as the rest of his genetic shortcomings. He has paid two thousand dollars and has never been surrounded by so many attractive women in his life. And after the fillies have got wind of his breath, he never will be again - ever. He had been married to Bambi Angel Burrs for eight years before divorcing her after her pet dog, Chastity, had continuously attacked him whenever he approached her, possibly something to do with his lascivious penchant for bestiality.  

Bambi Burs and Chastity




"The girls are mosly sincere and craving attention and wish to start a new life in the west," he recounted as he poured himself another extra strength vodka made in the backwater of Poltava from recycled mountain springwater. "I might not be suitable to American women, but I have plenty of money and know how to treat a lady!"




Yoosa Vibratovski

To say that he might not be suitable or appealing to American women would be an understatement of humongous proportions as we had seen more attractive hedgehogs semi-frozen in the middle of a Siberian winter . Everyone wears name tags to make it easier to communicate, & even though less than 5% speak some form of broken Pigeon English, a prerequisite course in sign language at the Serbian Institute for Deaf Restitution proved the trick.The girl that I was speaking to, Yoosa Vibratovski, albeit through a Lebanese interpreter, Hugh No Whohiam, who incidentally missed out on the Serbian sign language course, told me that local men drink themselves stupid and that domestic violence was becoming more & more intolerable since the onset of Glasnost & the rise of expendeable income. Life abroad had to be much better even if dental hygiene was below the standard of all the beaver hunters in outer Mongolia.

Downhalongdrop & mail order bride

on her wedding day

Another girl from uptown Warsaw relayed some of the problems faced by foreigners in a strange country. The agency that mismatched her with Welshman, Downhalongdrop Mine, never told her about residence permits, the culture of biannual divorce and the extraordinary Welsh habit of singing all day long, mostly during showers at sunrise, midday & sundown at the local rugby club. She had spent so many hours at the Cllinmawid Dragons Rugby Club that most people thought she coached the U14b side, which incidentally she did but it had little to do with rugby.

Recently she had dental repair by the local blacksmith when some of the buck shot from her usual dinner of jugged rabbit, freshly caught at the 25 meter line by a collapsed scrum, shattered both her lower premolars. She added that to engage in a long term relationship with a Welshman, ultimately a total impossibility, one had to drink excessively, of course, and pander to the most primitive of foreplay, usually a game of hide and seek in a nearby wood during a thunderstorm, and sexual antics that revolved around some primal rutting ritual dressed in sixteenth century drag mounted on a white horse & only on days with a partial eclipse over leap years.