11th May 2013 - London

Roy and I have just returned from the Twickenham Sevens Tournament in London where we had been invited to assist with the major preparations, largely on culinary intake, for the Zimbabwe national sevens team. The team coach, Ivantoo Stillplay, had made us most welcome and requested all players speak English in our presence or be dropped. The only white player in the squad, Simon Mann, on tour leave from Chikurubi Prison in central Harare & now fluent in Swahili, kept perusing the crowd for any sign of his once collaborator & now confirmed traitor, Mark 'Mywords' Thatcher, who has taken up his mother's recently vacated room at the Ritz.

The teams cook & assistant coach

Kawasaki Hondo enjoys a snack before the match

On inspection of the players in the showers prior to the game, we noted that many had backsides most overweight Hottentots would prize. The opinion that the majority of the side were unfit became evident when flying winger, Kawasaki Hondo, regurgitated last night's bean soup over the masseur perched on the deadball line after his first 'length of the field' sprint with legs moving faster than Singer sewing machines in a Beijing sweat shop. The team spent the first half against the kiltless Scots thinking more about their next curry tiffin than playing the game of sevens. Team cook, Jamie Oliver nCake, kept bellowing instructions from the sidelines but the only overlap that came to mind for the back line was clearly focused on the next broad bean roti at half-time.

Dwarte leaves the field

Dwarte Moreira, the renowned grenadilla vendor from downtown Lisbon, scored a wonderful solo try running the length of the Twickenham ground quicker than a gazelle on angel dust, only to be stretchered off having ruptured both his groin muscles & leaving his balls isolated down by his ankles. Zimbabwe's most revered player, Morgan Robert Moo-Gayab, a preferred ballot counter from the rural Chirundu area, equalled the French maestro Jean Baptiste Sugmeeorv's record of missing seventeen consecutive conversions before half-time.

The first time we hooked up with the Kenyan team was at an impromptu prayer meeting called by traveling shangaan & champion spear thrower, Billy 'the Spear' nThroat, as guests at a Maasai reed dance on the outskirts of the Amboseli National Park.

Billy "The Spear" in action

The shangaan Billy was sponsored by Kenyan Airways, a company yet to be formed at the time due to a parliamentary delay on its proposed 50 million Kwatcha bailout for its first year of operations, and had been hired because of his belief that divine intervention would pull them through. His position went as quickly as the hapless team who exited the tournament in the first round to be ferried back to Nairobi on Kenyan Airways' inaugural flight in a refurbished Brittania turbo prop. Kenya's game with the Kiwis made the latter look more like roasted goats than fleet footed sevens players in the first half, only for Kenya to capitulate a 17- nil lead at half-time to lose by a whopping 31-17. The coach has apparently banned all curry tiffins at half-time for future sevens tours.

7th May 2013 - Pretoria

Bruce Yoronyorown

Gotha plane

Roy and I have just returned from Waterkloof Air Base on the outskirts of Pretoria, formerly the government stronghold of the apartheid regime.  Bruce Dhlamini Yoronyorown, the Chief of State Protocol and Sideline Tenders, is the man being blamed for the Gotcha wedding debacle. He apparently used the President's name to carry out this week's large operation involving the sometime Air Force, Police, Home Affairs and away from Home Affairs, otherwise known as the Holiday Affairs. These facts emerged today during the preliminary investigation concerning the landing of the Gotcha's new A330 on loan from the Indian government's Invest in India Incentives Dept.  Bruce, who was unavailable for comment as he was back on the family sugar plantation in Mpumalanga, is reported to have recruited many willing police staff with the lure of extra pay, the odd overseas holiday and the mandatory sponge cake each. 

The Indian High Commissioner, Verandah Atmyhouse Gotcha, incidentally is no relative to the extended visiting wedding family. He is from Goa and they are from Cumha. He has been recalled to the Dehli Night Steekers and also back to Pretoria to face the allegations that he colluded with the missing, Yoronyorown.

Verandah in action

Three generals, Colonel Mustard and Mrs Plum have all been suspended and funnily enough from different parts of their anatomy until the investigation is completed. The public outcry, which was all from behind close doors following the landing, has been growing in momentum to such a degree that senior cabinet ministers have all been distancing the President from the affair. But it must be said that all the other affairs have always been public knowledge.

The new developments have been named Gotchagate and have been dubbed into Hindi and a few other dialects from East India as well as into a few dialects of Yemeni & Sudanese, not to mention Pigeon Portuguese for our northern neighbours & a German slang for the Namibians

The newly weds, Ilaska Foryorhand and Ivot Gotcha, left South Africa  through the canteen exit at East Polokwane domestic airport, again escaping

Ilaska & Ovot

passport control and the security frisk which if it is by a male African is one step below sexual harassment. Strangely enough, the Gotcha owned Cessna jet carrying the fresh Tandoori curry tiffin, made by a three parts step cousins to the bridesmaid was not investigated either, despite causing a cholera outbreak in the newly renovated airport canteen.

Gotha jet powered biplane

Sutra on his way to a massage

The Sun City man'age'ment have opened an enquiry into the alleged behaviour of one of the Gotcha family, Sutra Hennyones Moonsammy, who was being treated in the hotel sanatorium for a form of wildly spreading bushfire gonorrhoea with a balm imported from Saudi Arabia. It is being purported that he sent for hotel masseur, Goodness Andrelieft, to massage him for a few hours before the ceremony. He supposedly cornered her on the Chaise Longue and tried to play inspector gadget with her. Her furtive cries were heard by Janitor, Vish Iwasthere, who came to her rescue. Sutra was only wearing a turban he had bought in downtown Morroco a few weeks earlier and Goodness was in her tribal dress.........nought.

6th May 2013 - Bananas & Milk Duds

BANANAS & MILK DUDS – your kind of stuff ! ! !  A good laugh to start the day ! ! 

Below is an article written by Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated. He details his experiences when given the opportunity to fly in a F-14 Tomcat. If you aren't laughing out loud by the time you get to 'Milk Duds,' your sense of humor is seriously broken.

Now this message is for America 's most famous athletes:

Someday you may be invited to fly in the back-seat of one of your country's most powerful fighter jets. Many of you already have. John Elway, John Stockton, Tiger Woods to name a few. If you get this opportunity, let me urge you, with the greatest sincerity... Move to Guam . 
Change your name.
Fake your own death!

Whatever you do.

Do Not Go!!!
I know.

The U.S. Navy invited me to try it. I was thrilled. I was pumped. I was toast! I should have known when they told me my pilot would be Chip (Biff) King of Fighter Squadron 213 at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach .

Whatever you're thinking a Top Gun named Chip (Biff) King looks like, triple it. He's about six-foot, tan, ice-blue eyes, wavy surfer hair, finger-crippling handshake -- the kind of man who wrestles dyspeptic alligators in his leisure time. If you see this man, run the other way, Fast.

Biff King was born to fly. His father, Jack King, was for years the voice of NASA missions. ('T-minus 15 seconds and counting .' Remember?) Chip would charge neighborhood kids a quarter each to hear his dad. Jack would wake up from naps surrounded by nine-year-olds waiting for him to say," We have liftoff."

Biff was to fly me in an F- 14D Tomcat, a ridiculously powerful $60 million weapon with nearly as much thrust as weight, not unlike Colin Montgomerie. I was worried about getting airsick, so the night before the flight I asked Biff if there was something I should eat the next morning.

Bananas,' he said.
'For the potassium?' I asked.
"No," Biff said," because they taste about the same coming up as they do going down."

The next morning, out on the tarmac, I had on my flight suit with my name sewn over the left breast.

(No call sign -- like Crash or Sticky or Leadfoot. But, still, very cool.) I carried my helmet in the crook of my arm, as Biff had instructed. If ever in my life I had a chance to nail Nicole Kidman, this was it.

A fighter pilot named Psycho gave me a safety briefing and then fastened me into my ejection seat, which, when employed, would egress me out of the plane at such a velocity that I would be immediately knocked unconscious.

Just as I was thinking about aborting the flight, the canopy closed over me, and Biff gave the ground crew a thumbs-up. In minutes we were firing nose up at 600 mph. We leveled out and then canopy-rolled over another F-14..

Those 20 minutes were the rush of my life. Unfortunately, the ride lasted 80.. It was like being on the roller coaster at Six Flags Over Hell. Only without rails. We did barrel rolls, snap rolls, loops, yanks and banks. We dived, rose and dived again, sometimes with a vertical velocity of 10,000 feet per minute. We chased another F-14, and it chased us.

We broke the speed of sound. Sea was sky and sky was sea. Flying at 200 feet we did 90-degree turns at 550 mph, creating a G force of 6.5, which is to say I felt as if 6.5 times my body weight was smashing against me, thereby approximating life as Colin Montgomerie.
And I egressed the bananas.

And I egressed the pizza from the night before.

And the lunch before that.

I egressed a box of Milk Duds from the sixth grade.

I made Linda Blair look polite. Because of the G's, I was egressing stuff that never thought would be egressed.

I went through not one airsick bag, but two.

Biff said I passed out. Twice. I was coated in sweat. At one point, as we were coming in upside down in a banked curve on a mock bombing target and the G's were flattening me like a tortilla and I was in and out of consciousness, I realized I was the first person in history to throw down.

I used to know "cool". Cool was Elway throwing a touchdown pass, or Norman making a five-iron bite. But now I really know 'cool'. Cool is guys like Biff, men with cast-iron stomachs and freon nerves. I wouldn't go up there again for Derek Jeter's black book, but I'm glad Biff does every day, and for less a year than a rookie reliever makes in a home stand.

A week later, when the spins finally stopped, Biff called. He said he and the fighters had the perfect call sign for me. Said he'd send it on a patch for my flight suit.

What is it?? I asked.

'Two Bags.' 

1st May 2013 - New York

Anyone for a shot ?

Roy and I have just returned from New York where we met with the supreme court judge, Dred Ful Nheer, who had presided over the controversial decision to send Hollywood wildcat, Lindsay Lohan, to a clinic for ninety days of treatment for substance abuse. Lohan, whose career is littered with bouts of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual orientation confusion & sexual abuse, & lack of weight control among other physiological problems, has confided to close confidant and former Iranian partner (& second cousin twice removed to the supreme court judge, & now finally removed), Iva Snatch Nheer, that she wants to beat this terrible affliction once and for all.

Iva Snatch

Isa Moonsamy

Lohan will be treated at the See'nfelt Centre in Westhampton Beach, Washington state, near the old whaling station, where some of the more controversial treatments includes diving with Orcas. An indemnity signature for all clinic patients is compulsory. Lohan's struggle since puberty to define her ever changing sexuality has seen her in some turbulent predicaments, including the time she hit a brazen Hindi waiter with an opened bottle of Tattinger at the Tossmeorf dinner on the outskirts of Montgomery, for mistakingly calling her 'son' outside the ladies loo. Lindsay Morgam Lohan, whose middle name was taken from Morgan Chetty the medical practioner from Avoca Hills in Durban, was very nearly tandoori if it had not been for the evangelist Hindi, Isa Moonsamy, coming to her defense. Lohan's recent generous donation to the Moonchilds Foundation for Sexual Rehabilitation & Other Comforts based in New Delhi was much appreciated. The Foundation reciprocated by erecting a statue in honour of Lohan showing her hermaphrodite status.

Fellow caber "tossers"

On another Indian holiday, Lohan threw a tantrum after being accused of stealing a necklace from a Seik in Goa during a seasonal monsoon rain dance festival last year. The man accusing her, Vish Iwasder, said that she had slipped it into her special weave sporran given to her after she won a teen caber tossing competition some years ago at the Scottish Highland Games held in Woodlands, California, an anomaly after the entire transplanted Larch forest had been decimated by the organisers due to the event being so inundated with entrants including most of Hollywood's aspiring young actors & all the gym members from the various iron pumping gyms & 'cash n carry' steroid outlets along Venice Beach. Unfortunately, that was the last Scottish games held at Woodlands, now renamed Larchless & completely Larch free, of course.

Warriors waiting to show their moves

The judge did mention that he would consider reducing Lohan's sentence should she donate the town, formely known as Woodlands, with enough money before the next full moon to erect a resin caber manufacturing facility on the nearby Indian reservation, Totemcaberseere On Woodless Hill. Chief Totem Kabarnsons Under a White Sky Without Whitemen & Lohan Squaw declared Lohan an honary squaw at her donation induction dance where fifty young Red Indian warriors lined up outside her teppee from sunset to sunrise taking turns to show her their individual versions of the native fertility dance. A delighted Lohan recently announced inbetween whisky binges with her fifty new cohorts at Totemcaberseere On Woodless Hill that she is expecting sextruplets on the next full moon.

30th April 2013 - Amsterdam

Roy and I have just returned from Amsterdam where we invited to the ascension of Dutch King Willem Alexander to the throne recently abdicated by his mother, Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands. Willem, strangely enough named after an Afrikaans rugby player from Warmbaths & rumoured to be the father of Willem Alberts of current Sharks shame, is the first king in over 120 years with his wife, Queen Maxima, named after an old car model manufactured by Datsun in the '70's. The crowd of 25,000 gathered around Dam Square, famous for its potent line of marijuana, to cheer the Dutch Royal family. The throne is largely stripped of political power but still invested with enormous symbolic significance, and the masses, most sporting dreadlocks only Marley would care for, came forward to greet their new king. 

One of the first people to congratulate him was former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, sporting a new crop of mahogany hair & whose new Bunga Bunga party has started to make serious inroads in the political arena and equally serious inroads into the pool of young girls housed in the Navigli modelling sector of Milan, phoned him from a new nightclub in downtown Brera, & no that's not the same place as our Berea with its equally impressive array of Hindis recently migrated from Stanger, Isipingo, Phoenix & Chatsworth, which areas are rapidly becoming ghost towns now largely populated by all of Nigerians, Angolans, Zimbabweans & various genetic varieties of Portuguese infused Mozambicans, all without any passports & certainly all without any visas to complicate matters. Mandrax, of course, is their drug of choice.

The Dutch Monarch is never crowned, since, in the absence of a state church, there is no cleric to carry out the coronation. The last cleric was seen paddling down the Swanee in 1944 & away from the Germans. The Dutch have to be lauded for this approach as it proves a monarchy based on non-religious lines can be as popular as anywhere else in this twisted world of ours. The Dutch Monarchy has seen rising popularity and this year 78% of the flat landers & windmill specialists voted in favourite of it. On the other hand, monarchies run under religious auspices have seen declining support over recent years and there is a welcome message in that association. One of the devotee's of the King, a bric-a-brac seller on the crowded street, Klas Ovfortyfour, has been pushing sacks of 'primo' ganja imported from the Valley of a Thousand Hills to its visitors for years, and believes that Willem has made it possible for the generations to mingle and that he has united his people. Hence the statue of the former Prince Willem in his Zulu garb & sporting a tan outside the municipal building that divides the former West & Smith streets in downtown Durban. 

Previously, the 46 year old King Willem was a water management specialist & part-time rugby player for the Warsaw municipality, and his attractive other half, Maxima, was an investment banker from Argentina during the Post-Peron juntas & Argentina's subsequent sometime reunion with the capitalist world. How the two eventually met from those diverse locations was down to a European convention in Warsaw over the '82 Falklands conflict with Argentina when their parents acted as intermediaries for Thatcher & the Argentine government. Willem's father acted on Thatcher's behalf from his position as head butler at Downing Street & Maxima's father on Argentina's behalf, her father having emigrated to Argentina in July '45 to resume his research on identical twins. The two were found in a firm embrace during one of the convention tea-breaks behind a statue dedicated to the free 'Falkland POW's' campaign launched by the then underground Nazi party from their base at Northlands Private Girls' School chapel rectory in Buenos Aires in a poignant homage to the atrocities perpetuated by German policies during the last World War. No-one has managed to prize them apart since, it appears. The Northlands rectory still has various traditional rites attributed to the current school choir's recital of 'Save Jeruslaem, Our Land!' that continues to form part of Netanyahu's foreign policy rhetoric & stubborn refusal to resolve the tribulations & conflict along the Gaza Strip. 'I blame this conflict on the Germans!' is his fond riposte to any European cajoling at a final resolution.