O P o t B

The idea came to me when I had to renew my motor vehicle license, and not being one to stand around waiting in queues, I decided to get the job done through one of the service providers that have people who stand in queues to process your license renewal.  At the same time there was a protest march in the centre of the city and it struck me.  Maybe here is the perfect opportunity for a new business.  One that would not only create jobs, but also provide a protesters with the numbers they need to become much more effective.  I call it "Strike for you!" and it provides various options and services to facilitate the strike/protest action and provides both individual and union, NGO and crowd services. For a fee an individual can hire a Casual Striker or alternatively by pooling the resources of friends, family and or colleagues one or more Casual Strikers who would represent the individual(s) in the strike.  Casual Strikers will be outfitted appropriately with a ...

He sat on the large wingback chair to the right of me.  An ebony coffee table, a sure hint at the prestigious nature of the club in which we sat, between us providing a glass surface to support the aromatic, rich foamed coffee filled cups.  A plate filled with light little puffs of pastry that melted in the mouth was placed nearby.  His immaculate black suit broken by a perfectly starched white shirt and bright red tie contrasting perfectly with the deep red crushed velvet upholstery that covered the chair.  Perfectly polished shoes peeked below the hemline of his trousers barely concealing the bright red socks that covered his feet.  A ROLEX adorned his right hand and a single gold bracelet his left.  His hair combed back and beard well groomed and strong jaw completed the picture.  So perfect was its execution that it would no doubt be the envy of every of any reputable fashion magazine.  He lifted an eyebrow and in an instant a butler materi...

Like all anglers out there I am hoping that one day I will be able to land “the one”.   To those who are not familiar with angling or who occasionally wet their lines for a bit of fun and even to some experienced anglers, “the one” is the biggest fish you have ever caught.  But like most things in life it is not that simple.  “the one” means different things to different anglers and in fact there could be many “ones”.  To put it into perspective the concept originated with the indomitable captain Ahab who, seeking revenge for the loss of his ship and his leg, pursues the legendary white sperm whale Moby Dick. In terms of “the one” many would consider this to be the ultimate “one”, from an anglers perspective, restricted down to a particular individual, even though I may say that a whale is a far cry from a fish. In more recent times the movie Jaws, in which the late Robert Shaw plays the part of the shark hunter, Quint, hunting the great white man eating s...

Just how much truth is there in horoscopes?  Not the ones that try and predict your day to day fortune,  or ones that try and state how happy you will or will not be,  or how a stranger, who I am still waiting for incidentally, will enter and change your romantic life forever.  I am more interested to understand is there a bases behind some of the personality traits that horoscopes claim I should have? I have tried to gauge this from observing some of my friends and family who are also Gemini's, yes I am a twin, but in all this time I failed to fathom whether or not they display these traits or not.  I am convinced that they were born actually later in the year but their parents had inadvertently registered them as a May/June baby thus creating a conflict with their personality trait, horoscopically (no you wont find this word in the dictionary I just invented it) that is, which has largely led to an internal conflict thus forcing the person into totally con...

I cannot wait for the day that they discover how to teleport you from one place to another instantaneously.  Even though the pundits claim that air travel has made the world a smaller place, and I do not deny it, in my book it is not small enough.  The fact that I need to sit around for eight or nine hours, unable to do much but stare at some screen, is totally unacceptable by todays standards. What has happened to the research and development in air travel?  Oh, it is there, however I think it is completely misdirected.  It would seem that the only research that airlines and airplane manufacturers are concerned about is working out how to get more and more people into economy class. I am surprised, or maybe its just early days, that they have not yet figured out that if they reduce the isle so that you could only walk sideways down it they can get more people into the plane. "And what about safety?" do you say, well let me ask you this, when last have you he...

Driving down the highways of Gauteng at night, one cannot cease to be amazed by the violet light that breaks the monotony of the yellow floods that light up the road.  As you pass under the e-toll gantries you cannot fail to be amazed by the technology that has been installed. All to collect an e-toll around the national roads in Gauteng.  What the heck was SANRAL thinking!  The system, when implemented,  will bring in a revenue of 3.513 billion rand while the cost of collection would be 2.543 billion rand about 70% of the collected revenue.  This makes no mention of the cost of SANRAL staff, administration costs, etc. which I suspect will yield a negative return.  Fortunately a court ruling has put a halt to the project and for the moment its "e-tolling in the wind"! Parkhurst used to be a nice quaint suburb where you could park your car and walk around the streets and have a look at the interesting items that are on display or alternatively stop by for...

A thumb pressed into my muscle as the masseuse worked the knots of stress out of it and just as the knots in my flesh were undone, the knots in my mind was undone and my thoughts drifted.  Drifted to that place where the inner being stands naked.  A place where the veil of perception is removed and all is laid bare.  A place where no blame can be placed, a place where we have to face the truth about ourselves. It is a journey I feared.  It was a fear of what I may find, fear that what I found I may not like, but more than that I feared that it was one where I could lay no blame and had to accept whatever I saw.  And laying on that table, some 4000 miles away from any familiar surroundings, as the masseuse worked his hands across my back relieving the stresses and strains of everyday life, that I decided the time was right to take the journey. At first I saw the scares, not twisted and distorted as one may think but rounded and beautiful in patterns upon the...

It was not the first time that he had forgotten.  She woke up early that morning hoping that he had remembered.  She waited in anticipation, as he stumbled out of bed and went through his morning ritual, hoping that this time at least, after fifteen years of marriage, he had remembered.  Nothing, not even a knowing smile just the usual "thank you" when she handed him a cup of coffee.  And then, jacket and case in hand,  a quick peck on the cheek and he was gone. She was tired of this! The daily routine of taking care of the kids, the house, running the errands and not to mention running "mums taxi" and this is all she gets.  Where had the romance gone! After the first years and the kids, it seemed as though life had become a collection of routines.  Even the children, much more concerned about the way they looked, had forgotten. Finally the house was hers and she stepped into the shower.  She recalled the excitement she felt when the guy at t...

Is it not amazing that we have become accustomed to having conversations in sentences that are no more than 160 characters in length and that never before have we typed on a keyboard as much as we do today.  We are surrounded by a myriad of texting applications-SMS, Twitter, Facebook, BBM, WhatsApp and many more-and whats more is that they have all gone mobile.  Would the Remington company, who developed the QWERTY keyboard layout, have imagined that their design would become ubiquitous?  To be able to communicate using only 160 characters, you have to pack more meaning into your messages or attempt to get more words into the limited space that you have. The younger generation seems to have got this down to a tee and trying to decipher one of their messages would require the modern equivalent of the Rosetta Stone and a concise dictionary of hidden meanings.  Believe it or not but, more often than not, entire conversations are carried out in just one line of text...

I have always considered my life to be quite ordinary and, well to put it bluntly, quite boring.  That was until I took a closer look and discovered, if anything else, it has been rather quite eventful if not exciting.  In these forty odd years, more closer to fifty than I would like to imagine, I have done many things and like an obsessive collector, I cannot seem to get enough.  Even though, looking through a critical eye, I cannot claim it was all good, and dare I say not all bad either. The thing about the life experiences, as I call them, is that it is often the least profound moments that have the most effect on us.  Like the Buddha sitting under a Peepal tree, contemplating life, a seemingly mediocre event, that turned out to be so profound that it changed the life of billions to this day. While on Haj(pilgrimage), after the evening prayer, the punishing heat rising from the ground while throngs make their way to grab a bite to eat or a refreshing drink b...

Is it not amazing that what we did not have a few years ago has suddenly become quite pervasive and we find that we can not imagine how we were able to do without them.  A couple of them come straight to mind email, cell phones, SMS messaging (texting),  BBM (for the Apple users out there WhatsApp) and FaceBook.  And these have changed the way we interact with the world in ways we cannot imagine. Remember the days when the only mail you received came in an envelope and was usually delivered twice a week to your doorstep by the Mailman? While this type of mail is still available, it has been largely replaced by that electronic companion that most of us today live by, email.  Never before has mankind written so much to each other as we do today.  I have seen emails that have been written by aspiring novelists that explain everything in excruciating detail, and others that say so little that hours are spent trying to decipher what the person is saying and that...

5 a.m. in the morning, Wilson's Warf, and I was getting ready for my aventure on the high seas in an attempt to land the "big one".  The skipper looked confident that although there was a significant wind, the seas were much calmer then the last few days when the deep ocean swells, visible from the shoreline, were white capped.  Filled with confidence, despite the internet weather report of two meter swells, I boarded the rather small boat and swallowed a tablet to prevent the onslaught of that scourge of the seven seas that lays waste to the strongest of men.    The boat could not have been longer than eight meters from bow to stern, and by four meters across at the stern.  Two rows of bunk seats, that doubled as storage hatches, reached from the bow to the bridge,  approximately halfway to the stern.  The bridge was the size of a wardrobe with its back facing the bow and a door opening the port side of the boat.  T...

In recent months, after many years of absence, I decided to start fishing again.  In the hope of landing the "big one" I have kitted myself out with some nifty fishing tackle-although there are a few bits and pieces that still need to be had-and a good dash of camping equipment to make life a little more comfortable at waters edge.  After arriving and setting up I cast the lines in and settle down to enjoy the day. If there is one thing that I cannot not seem to get right is the placement of equipment.  For the rest of the day I would be stepping over things and bumping things over negotiating a maze of stuff to get to where I want to be.  In spite of the wide open space, I successfully manage to economize on the little area under the gazebo to mine own detriment.  All hope faded at finding a solution to this problem. That was until a few weeks ago when everything changed.  I was looking at the gentleman fishing next to me and I could not believe mine ...

Happy New Year and may your days be filled with love, peace, happiness and prosperity!  I know its a tad late, however I did resolve to get this blog written on New Years day however I just could not get around to it.  This year I have taken a new spin on the resolution issue and have a list, approximately five A4 pages in length (double sided) of new years resolutions.  This will increase the probability of achieving at least one of my resolutions.  Like the guy who bets on every number at the roulette table, he has got to win something, even if his net position remains the same, well almost. In the past I would pen at least ten resolutions believing that the small number of resolutions would be easily obtainable, but you guessed it by the time I reached the end of the first week of the new year, or even sooner, the list would be filed in some prime estate in file thirteen. In an attempt to find the reason for this failure to achieve these few simple ...