Thursday night we headed north to that weird Montecasino (where the sky is always blue no matter when the sun sets, and those cobblestones make enemies out of great heels) for the premiere of Material, the movie that made Barry Ronge cry and that has people declaring that we finally have a local film with the potential to rival a Leon Schuster blockbuster at the box office.
I hope so.
It’s just too good to pass up. South Africa’s minibus taxi industry is planning to launch an airline it was announced this week. It will be an easy transition seeing as how most taxis fly past you anyway. This morning I watched one Joburg taxi driver disregard a red light near the Zoo lake. Yesterday another driver sat talking on his cellphone while inching closer and closer and closer to my bumper – his taxi jampacked with extra commuters in what looked like a scene from some 80’s college frat party where some drunk smartass wants to see how many jocks can be packed into a telephone booth. At least no one was mooning me.
Continue reading
Apple's Steve Jobs
As with most Oscar winning movies made off US shores there’s always interest in a local translation.
This one is priceless.
Watch the new Nando’s ad with comedian Kagiso Lediga doing his version of Trevor Noah and taking Cell C’s pompous ad campaign to a whole new level. Still irked by the con of “we listened to our customers” when Cell C chose to manufacture a customer instead. What it is with companies who really want customers but just can’t stand having to deal with them. Continue reading
#191.Share this piece I read on the Toyota Prius recall because it’s funny and it deserves to be shared especially on a day where there is little relief from the news headlines (a combination of high drama from Winnie Mandela and real trauma). Writing in Time magazine, Joel Stein says:
“I am not one of those people who sit around rooting for product recalls. That’s because those people don’t exist. But I got excited when Toyota recalled the 2010 Prius. It’s not that I dislike the Prius. My lovely wife Cassandra has one, and it is an excellent vehicle. Except for its need to constantly tell you how excellent it is. There’s a screen in the center of the dashboard with an animation that shows how much energy the car is recycling as you drive it. If one of your employees were really efficient but throughout the day kept standing up in his cubicle and yelling, “I am really efficient!” you would fire him. Or punch him in the steering wheel.
#162. Be amused by the religion flowchart that answers the big question of “What should I be?”.
The Religion Flowchart
* Thanks to LK for this
#160. Eat fluffy scrambled eggs at one of Joburg’s cutest breakfast spots. I am letting this secret out.
I think of “The Birdcage” and it conjures up memories of going to the cinema in Parkview (in the late 70s suburbs like Greenside and Parkview had their own moviehouses*) to see La Cage aux Folles with my mother and my brother. We may have been from Benoni but we loved big hair, spangles and showtunes (that’s’ probably why). It also makes me want to repeat Peter Sellers’ mantra from that crazy movie The Party, “Birdie num num”. Continue reading
#157. Get the latest news on the future of newspapers. The Onion is reporting that according to a piece published “this week in American Journalism Review, 93 percent of all newspaper sales can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands.” Continue reading
#145. Watch Barack Obama and that fly – the Ninja Remix.
In June Obama made world news headlines when he killed a fly. I recently came across this remixed version of that major event.