A novel in the offal: Well placed sources say that Bullard has retired to an apartment in Spain’s Benidorm coastal resort where he will be concentrating his writing energies on screenplay entitled “In the halls of MantoZuma”. We here at the PlanetBog franchise wish him everything of the best and promise not to abuse him out the car window, should we ever see him sitting at a sidewalk table at Georges on 4th after 15:00.

The reason why these pages were not graced with my literary finesse on Friday was that I was actually working. I was attending a one day conference on Fuses and Unplugged Connection Kilowatt power alternatives. The conference was sponsored by Eskom. My black event sponsored shoulder bag with FUCK ESKOM in bright yellow lettering looks rather swanky. The aim of the conference was to explore alternatives to coal fired electricity generation. My suggestion that we burn Bloemfontein instead of coal was ignored and when I noted that East London was not much use to South Africa and could be converted into a stunning pumped storage scheme if we flooded the Buffalo river basin and pumped the water up to the Hogsback highlands, I was threatened with ejection from the proceedings. Shortly after lunch I was physically removed from the event after I outlined my plans to turn the Knynsa lagoon into the worlds largest pebble bed reactor powered exclusively via oyster farts. Undeterred I have submitted via electronic mail to the CEO of ESKOM, a plan to power the whole of Johannesburg with the hot air generated by the Thought Leader bloggers.

Yeah, its been a slow day…

I feel sorry for all the folk living in Rivonia, Midrand and that wretched Sandton suburb who are load-shed all day long. It’s my theory that the bulk of the load on the national grid is caused by by people who instead of being productive at work, are actually sitting on their work PC’s ,banging out blog posts all day putting a huge strain on the grid.

Just wait for Monday. We will all be faced with a huge bout of load shedding due to all the women bloggers who just have to share their Saturday Night Slapper outings with us.

Pretoria is also in huge trouble. The scale of the blackouts are immense! This is mostly due to Steve Hofmeyr’s blog posts. Have you seen how long his posts are? He must use at least 10 megawatts for one post. The comments section on his blog probably sucks another 5 Megawatts off the grid.

Another blog that also could be classified as problematic is that blog about Hockey. Keo, I think its called.

These people should be taken to task now and made to see the error of their ways, before its to late. An urgent remedy is required – Blogs should be classified according a colour code, associated with power usage and bullshit content: Green for an environmentally friendly blog like mine. Minimal bytes used!, Orange for blogs with lots of widgets and custom code. Brown for blogs that use maximum processing power and have a high BS content. Most blogs I read are classified as Brown.

These brown blogs should be “tool-shedded” for 2 hours per day, taken-off line and the prospective reader automatically routed to the Friends of Jacob Zuma site as punishment for wasting our precious power resources.

Its not to late to stop blogging.

Way across the chasm from the Gloggers, we have the media and newsy types who blog; Lets just call them Muggles (why? , because they have nought but a clue when it comes to fiddling with the dark arts) These are very frustrated bloggers. Besides the fact that most of them studied at Rhodes, they are having to play catchup to the geeks because of a nasty thing called convergence.

A few years ago, a happy sub-editor or drunken hack’s only interaction with technology was bashing out a story on a MAC or PC and then going home. Not any more – these media types (who secretly wish they were in advertising) and journo’s (who secretly wish they were in the pub) have to understand the mechanics of party politics, the intricacties of liver transplants as well as CSS, XML, HTML and ASPX. If they don’t, their blogs are going to look like crap, (much like the one you are reading right now) and we all know that Muggles just have to have a styling blog.

In the middle of the chasm on a small shaky pinnacle sit the bloggers who only blog because they have to. These are usually semi-retired news paper columnists who alternate their days between lunches and wine tastings, the odd has-been celebrity and of course there are the few authors who have to please publishers into getting another book deal.

At the bottom of the chasm, scattered amongst large piles of guano sit the Droggers. These are the diary bloggers who rather than express an opinion, feel it necessary to inform the rest of us of their daily doings i.e. “ woke up at 5:00am, experienced flatulence 4 times, brushed teeth, had skim milk with half a cup of bran, experienced more flatulence, went to work, had dribbly bum at 10:00am, took 2 Immodiums, felt better, changed undies in the bog for gym shorts”

And then there’s the normal blogger like me. Hundreds of us who consistently put out 200 plus quality words a day into their blogs that NOBODY BLOODY READS.

Les Huguenots (not to be confused with Hottentots or Jelly Tots) were mostly craftsmen and vintners and like the Dutch they were staunch Calvinists. The Dutchman (i.e. Simon van der Stel, not Steve Hofmeyr) kindly gave the Huguenots some land and they happily settled in growing grapes, humping the local population and getting rat faced on Muscadel. Historians speculate that within two generations, all trace of French influence was lost, these Frenchmen became Dutchmen (like Kurt Darren) and ancestors to a large part of our Afrikaans population. This is were all our trouble starts.

Now I’m a Rugby fan and watching last nights game between France and Ireland I noticed (again) that Pieter De Villiers is still playing for France. Noticeable of course because he is a South African. I wondered how on earth he could’ve got himself into the French national team and then it hit me….Les Huguenots!

I grabbed the fixture and player listing for our team and scanned through it with a growing sense of unease noticing a Du Randt, a Du Plessis, a Olivier, a Rossouw, a Du Preez, a Fourie and a Steyn.

We have 7 Huguenot players in our team, effectively once on the field and as soon as these 7 get a whiff of Garlic and Gauloises, South Africa will have 8 players and France 22.

We cant beat those odds. I’m off to get a baguette and beret.

“Vive la France!”

Moneyweb recently posted records of email correspondence that occurred between themselves and Mr Brown, discussing the possibility of Mr Brown writing a series of articles in which he would put his side of the story forward for public consumption. Presumably this story would be a tell-all account of how a couple of billion bucks went up in not so holy smoke and how said smoke magically transformed into health spa’s, soccer teams and women’s day care centres. The idea for this literary endeavour was put forward by Mr Brown.

Now, in the sacred (and not very ancient) craft that is called computer programming one will come across (from time to time) Obfuscated code. This is usually code that some lame headed programmer has used to in order to be perceived as clever by his colleagues , but in most cases used to hide his own inability to get a job done properly and elegantly. Reading through Mr Browns rather lame emails , the word OBSFUCATE screamed itself out loud from his faux indignation at the local media, to Grade 4 spelling errors, to his demands that Moneyweb supply him with a full list of all the IP addresses belonging to individuals that had made disparaging comments about him on the Moneyweb blog pages.

Predictably,the opportunity to read Mr Browns prose will not transpire.

Time will tell whether or not the the Fidentia collapse was due to criminal intent or pure incompetence and ineptitude but one thing is patently obvious – Mr Brown does not have a clue nor is he a heavyweight.