the corner office

Turns out Henry and Rufus aren't going to the pet shop after all. Apparently they were already dropped off at the pet shop on Monday, but the people at the pet shop phoned up on Monday afternoon or so and said that if the neighbours didn't come to fetch the pups, they'd be sent to the SPCA to be put down. I'm not sure what the full story was, but basically the pups were rescued from the Big Syringe and brought home.

Young George the Mongoose Dog is off to his new home tomorrow, with the neighbour's friend G, who's back from 3 months of playing golf and lazing on beaches in Thailand. Ronwen tried to get G to stick with George as the dog's name, not sure if it'll stick. G said he was thinking of "Benny" as a name. Noooo.

Dinner at Sandton City with AT. We went to Smith & Wollensky's which was nice, but not as good as the Eastgate S&W.

Sheesh, the number of kids missioning around Sandton and congregating in the Sandton Square (err, now the Nelson Mandela Square, how ironic) is frightening. Perhaps even more frightening is the number of 14 year olds in outfits that I couldn't even afford and who've probably done more hectic stuff in their short lives than I could've dreamed of in my 31 years. The usual story of obscenely wealthy parents getting rid of the kids for the evening by dropping them off in Sandton. Sandton has always been notorious for that, but it just seemed so much more apparent tonight.

As I always say, I love living in a large city as an adult, but I don't ever regret having grown up in a small town.

FIFA World Cup 2010 has been awarded to South Africa.

Good for morale and self-image, good for business, good for tourism, good for everyone except the poor Moroccans :-)

A while back I pointed to eish.net's excellent and damned funny review of the accents in the movie Stander. Ronwen and I finally got Stander on DVD, and we enjoyed it to bits.

For those who don't know (probably almost all non-Sefricans, and all Sefricans younger than, say, 25), Andre Stander was something of a cultural icon in the early 80s in South Africa. As a disillusioned Captain in the SA Police Force, he became a master of disguise and robbed 26 banks. He was caught and jailed, and escaped. In the six months after his escape, he and 2 cronies, Lee McCall and Allan Heyl became the Stander gang, and they robbed another 20 banks, and made utter fools of the cops. In one case, a bank manager bragged to radio reporters that the gang, having robbed his bank, had missed the safe that held most of the money. Hearing this on the radio, the gang turned around, drove back, and robbed the bank again. In another case, they robbed the bank right next to the offices of the police task force assigned to catch them. Chutzpah and flair were what it was all about.

Of course, I can't remember what of this is true and what's embellishment, but the real-life Stander gang were famous for their outrageous antics, so I don't doubt the crazier bits of the story. Strangely, my first memory of Andre Stander's name was in the news reports of him being shot and killed by a US policeman in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, circa 1983. Ever since, every time I hear mention of Fort Lauderdale, Andre Stander's name springs to mind.

As for the movie, I think eish.net's review does a better job of saying what I'd like to say. A Google search on Stander's name brings up a few articles that tell the true story upon which the movie is based, but which the movie doesn't faithfully recount. Some plot points didn't work for me, but on the whole it's a great story, which is what matters. The accents (always the first things South Africans worry about when it comes to the foreign actors) are plausible, if a little OTT.

The coolest thing about the movie for South Africans will be the late 70s, early 80s nostalgia and authenticity. We see old Omo adverts, TJ number plates, Ford Cortinas and Toyota Corollas. We see Riaan Cruywagen and old TV presenters we'd long since forgotten. We see awful 70's architecture like the Jan Smuts (Johannesburg) International Airport which was only revamped in the mid-90s, we see crap 70s curtains and we see "Mellow Yellow" police vans. We get to see some brilliant Sefricanisms and colloquialisms on celluloid, which doesn't happen too often.

In short: thumbs up.

Text of mail from CMac to me (I was working from home today, and we both live fairly close to the Makro store in question):

Subject: Look out window towards our place... Apparently Makro is burning down, again.

"Again" being the operative word. This is nuts. As Wayne Wides notes, this is the third Makro to burn down in 8 years. The Woodmead 2001 fire caused no amount of mirth, but this is plain ridiculous. Of course, speculation of foul play will be inevitable, but let's not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity. In Makro's case, it has to be serious stupidity. Whatever happened to once bitten, thrice shy? Also via Commentary, IOL article (where you can almost see the writers biting their tongues) and also a cool pic of the ex-Makro. And yes, we do have grass in the West Rand, I think that sandy patch is where another (hopefully less flammable) shopping centre is going up.

Sat on the couch with pups climbing all over me, and watched two movies this evening. First, She's All That. Sweet escapist oh-happy-days-at-high-school movie with young love and likeable characters who have everything, a la Beverley Hills 90210. I'm always a sucker for these sorts of movies, but don't tell anyone. But who is this Freddie Prinze Jr chap? Have I missed a whole chunk of popular culture in the past decade?

The second movie was A Time To Kill. Not a bad courtroom drama. In this, Samuel L Jackson (always rocking) plays a father in the deep South who kills two white men who are being tried for raping and trying to kill his 10 year old daughter. His case is taken on by a young lawyer, who tries to argue a case of temporary insanity. [Spoiler] Of course, Ronwen says to me "I've seen this before, it's hectic, and he just goes to the gas chamber in the end." So there's me watching the whole damned movie expecting the movie to end one way, but thankfully Ronwen had remembered incorrectly, and it ends on a happy note.

I like happy endings, but in this case I have to admit that the ending was a little shaky. Ultimately, the temporary insanity charge boiled down to 'would you blame him for killing these men' - which nobody in their right mind would, except that revenge and vigilantism are different things to the rule of law, and a violent attempt to seek justice is not necessarily the same thing as being insane. The real issue in this movie should have been reconciling the anger and sense of powerlessness of seeing injustice happen, especially when racism seeks to pervert any notion of justice, with the desirability of not taking the law into one's own hands. The movie tends to skirt around that and focus instead on simply establishing that if a crime is awful enough, you should be allowed to get away with murder for avenging it. Despite being emotionally stirring, it's a little frustrating because I have no doubt that it's a rare case where one would get away with something like this in real life. Still, any movie with a cast that has Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Kevin Spacey and Sandra Bullock doing their thang is well worth the watch.

... and not all good. Heard from the folks next door that they've had enough of the wailing and early-morning chaos, and the band of 4 ne'erdowells are to be split. Dre is staying (as was the plan), George the Mongoose-looking mutt is actually being kept for a friend who will be returning from overseas shortly, and Rufus the (only) Blonde and Henry the Baboon-furred runt are being given to a local pet store.

Saddening, to say the least. Admittedly, I've thought about drop-kicking them out the flat when they get carried away, and it's not as if we think of the other 4 pups of the litter who've already been given away, but having connected with these little horrors, it's hard to imagine having to say goodbye to them. *sigh*

Strangely, I saw the first sign of maternality (for want of a better word) from Tupac this evening. I got ribs from Thundergun in Robindale for dinner, and kept the bones for the dogs. I gave the first bone to Tupac, planning to give the remaining bones to the pups. Before I got very far, one of the pups followed Tupac, and Tupac gave up her bone to the pup. As each of the pups bothered her, she kept giving up the bones I was giving her, until each of them had one. Only then did she find a corner and settle down to scrunch on her own. It was quite something to see, especially because in every other respect she acts like she simply can't stand her offspring.

Having seen a less pleasant pack instinct manifesting in the pups over the past few days, it was heartwarming to see a sign of good doggieness for a change.

So, I'm sitting here, idly clicking through web sites, refreshing my Bloglines page, clicking through more web sites.

There are a number of productive things I could/should be doing. Cleaning the puppy-ravaged flat. Catching up on work. Doing one of my long-overdue varsity assignments. Working on my neglected Gentoo install which I haven't touched since last weekend. Reading a book.

Or I could sit here and surf some more.

Ronwen is watching Below, which seems to be a horror ghost movie on a submarine. I'm not even watching this and I'm nipping straws. I'm sitting at my desk at the far end of the room with headphones on, at right angles to the telly. Problem is, my peripheral vision still catches sudden movements, and there seem to be far too many of these.

I'm a wuss. I can't watch horror movies. Not even when my girlfriend holds my hand.

More to my taste, we watched Master and Commander last night. Ronwen got bored and stopped watching half way through, despite her having chosen it. Go figure :-) I'm not big on amputated limbs and gore and guts 19th-century style, but it wasn't gratuitous, and after a few gory bits to set the scene, the movie got on with the story, which is a good naval adventure yarn. Reading the reviews at IMDB, I saw more mention of the author whose characters inspired the movie: Patrick O'Brien. It's been a while since I read any naval fiction, I'll have to keep an eye out for some of his books.

This week started out promising to be pleasant, but things went South very quickly. I started the week with one crisis, and since then crisis after crisis after crisis have stacked up. Instead of battling through a crisis knowing that I'll be free and relaxed on the other end, this week just feels like I'm just popping crises off the stack, to get back to the crises that I was worrying about earlier in the week. I feel I'm like a cat covering crap on a marble floor.

(Yes, that's an old line, but it's apt :-)

Speaking of pets and crap, the puppies are cute, but only in small doses. Thank heavens our flat is tiled, is all I'm going to say.

Odd thought: you'd think that companies would want to make it easy to get hold of their TV adverts electronically, but nobody seems to think of it. While many companies do make their TV adverts available for download from their websites, I'm not aware of many in ZA that do. There have been many excellent local ads that I'd love to keep a copy of - both for posterity and to share with friends overseas. I'm always adding to my stash of adverts on my PC, but these ads are almost exclusively non-South African. It's a real pity.

Two heavily surreal ads recently have been MTN's "10 years of cellular freedom" advert with the freaky-looking dude in the freaky city with the freaky music and the messenger pigeons and chickens and whatnot, eventually rugby-tackling a news reporter to get onto TV, trying to get hold of his wife "Rice or potatoes?" Another has been the All Gold Tomato Sauce advert, with the cheesy 70's platteland factory vibe and the dweeby chap who says 'thirty-sixssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhh' ... 'Aaah love the way you say that (mah boy), ah hev jus thuh job for yoo'. (Punchline being 36 tomotoes in every bottle, but words can't do the advert justice). I can't imagine anyone other than South Africans finding it stupidly hilarious, but it had Ronwen and I in stitches the first time we saw it.

So wake up, companies! Mail systems across the country are bursting at the seams spreading jokes and movies between bored office workers, many of whom would be sending your adverts around if they were easy to come by! Considering how much a good TV ad must cost to produce (and air), how much more could it cost to sling it up on a website? Having spent that much money on an advert, and with more and more people spending time away from traditional advert-riddled TV, and spending time surfing the Net (or living on pay-channels like DSTV) instead, I'd think that any additional ways to enable and encourage people to see one's adverts would be worth a try.