On Sunday I had the pleasure of experiencing the beginning of my favourite phenomenon: Springtime in Pretoria. I attended “Park Acoustics” at the National Botanical Gardens. Ingredients: nature, music, refreshments and friends. Nature: the botanical gardens are beautiful, albeit somewhat grey, this time of year. Music: in the form of several bands performing chilled acoustic music as well as an unknown number of DJ(s) in between. Refreshments: whatever you wanted to bring (alcohol permitted- yes!) or wanted to buy from a place/guy called Mr Bean.  Friends: …? This was one ingredient I was lacking, which was actually quite nice. There were some people about that I knew but I wasn’t much in the mood for meeting new Afrikaans people, or any people for that matter, so I sat, alone, in my spot under a tree and got to enjoy the fauna and flora of Pretoria while drinking brandy and Fanta grape and listening to some cool bands. ‘Twas the perfect way to start off spring, but I must say, next time I would like to have some other people around so that I can (a) go to the loo if I need to and (b) have a little nap on the grass, without worrying about my shoes and such getting stolen.

Movie: Kick-Ass

Basic plot-line: A teenage boy decides to become a super-hero, without any super-powers or the resources to buy batman-like accessories. Along the way he meets up with Hit Girl and Big Daddy, a father-daughter combo of heroes who actually seem to know what they are doing. Hit Girl (played by 13 year-old Chloe Moretz) pulls off some anime-style moves, along with some jaw-dropping dialogue, including the C-word (scandalous!). This movie is a strange mix between Kill Bill and Superbad; I promise it will not leave you disappointed if you enjoyed either.

Tag line: With no power comes no responsibility.

Genre: Action/Comedy (I hate to put it in this genre, as it resembles no other action/comedy that I have ever seen.)

Would I watch it again? Yes

Would I buy the DVD? Yes

Am I adding it to my favourites on my Facebook page? Done

I made an agreement with my fellow bloggers to write more movie reviews for the blog in order to keep it from crashing and burning in the way that it did a couple of months ago. So here’s to new beginnings…

Movie: The A-Team

Rating: 6/10

Basic plot-line: Good guys in trouble. Lots of explosions. Good guys kill bad guys. Good guys win.

Tag line: There is no Plan B.

Genre: Action/Comedy

Is it worth watching: Yes (Bradley Cooper takes his shirt off on more than one occasion, plus we get to see Wikus van der Merwe pulling off an American accent.)

Would I watch it again? Maybe, if it happened to be on and I happened to be bored.

Would I buy the DVD? No

Am I adding it to my favourites on Facebook? No

My sister, her boyfriend and I are here on the veranda, enjoying the the lovely weather. What makes this a special day is that Ryan has brought along one of the breathalizers his company is trying to market.

Now I’m pretty pissed right now, but I think that this breathalizer has introduced a perverse into the group. The reason: To see how much we can drink before we’re over the limit.

To extrapolate: I believe that if you bring one of these to a social gathering, far from having a positive impact, you’ll find that you and your friends will see how much you can drink to get to the legal limit and how how long you can stay over it before throwing up on the furniture.

Please forgive the grammar.

It needs little to no describing. Please take note of the bullet hole detail.

I went for a late Sunday lunch at the only place in Pretoria where homosexuals can kiss in public. I’ve been three weekends in a row now, and sampled quite a bit of what there is to get. With my girlfriend. With regard to food. Here we go:

• Tribeca: I mostly reserve Tribeca for late night coffees, birthday cocktails and negotiations (long story). I tell ya, there is no place with prettier foam effects on their coffee. Or, as I discovered a year back, worse vodka martinis (except maybe Aandklas, where mine was served in a tumbler). Though, I would try the Lemon Drop… It’s quite lemony. It’s one of two places in the Square, as far as I can tell, that has Sunday music, which makes for a nice vibe in the immediate surroundings. Guess what though? In this case live music is a non-rivalrous, non-excludable good; I consumed it from across the way at Tasha’s.
• Tasha’s: is brand new, and ever since I saw teapots hanging from its ceiling I’ve been wanting to try it out. It’s pricey but yummy, my steaky pasta cost me 80 bucks but tasted classy. No strips of stewing beef – no, no – them was fillet chunks! Plus a shoppin’ bag for your take-away. Yeehaw. The wine’s practically served in goblets, which is nice for glass-by-glass buying, but if it’s wine you’re after then they can’t compete with my very favouritest place in the Square…
• MooMoo: Did I mention this is my favourite? If you want meat or wine, go here. (That’s kinda their catch phrase, so they obviously know their market.) All wine can be bought by the glass and they’ve got a happy hour from 4-5. The menus are plastered with cow-based cartoons, which I like even though the latest batch is a bit tired (no Larson anymore), the tables are all taken from the closed-down Baron, and Paul Anthony plays there (having yet to sing “Fields of Boys’ High” on my watch). I also think it’s good value because everywhere I look the prices of meaty meals are edging up and here I can get a 300g ribeye steak for R60 (admittedly ex-sides) or a R75 250g fillet.
• Lila’s: Which leads me to ask, why on Earth does Lila’s have ads in the parking lot for their amazing special of R69 for a 200g fillet? And as sexual-orientation-friendly as Brooklyn Square is, this place is just too gay. Perched at its pink tables, I have never seen its customers outnumber its waiters. I shall be shocked if it doesn’t tank, but I wouldn’t like to take bets on how long it will take considering how long the Grapevine hung on in the same stand.
• Col’cacchio: I think it’s ok. The food is ok. Except for the whole anchovy fillets I got on my puttanesca – that I was impressed with! See, I’ve presented it last not because it’s bad but because it’s boring. I just think it’s overrated. The pizzas are bland. If you want pizzas then you should just go to Toni’s instead. Yes, this might be inconvenient… Walking around Exclusive Books, meeting up with friends, buying your movie tickets, nipping off to Toni’s in Rietondale, arriving back at Brooklyn to queue for popcorn… But it will be worth it.

Insanity comes packaged in all forms as this video on teh Internets illustrates. This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen and I died moments after I watched it.

The video is of a “double rainbow” and is narrated, for three and a half minutes, by a bat-shit crazy man called “Yosemitebear”. He lives in the Yosemite National Park and has married into the Yosemite Indian tribe and says he has 2 Yosemite Indian children.

It seems to be becoming a scary trend that more and more of these bizarro people are becoming so famous, spawning an entire industry of T-shirts and other useless knick-knacks. Just two weeks ago Antoine Dodson, perhaps the world’s stupidest man, became famous for being crazy on camera after… the attempted rape of his sister.

Here are some of the best bits from the video at hand:

“Whoa, that’s a full rainbow, all the way.”

“Whoa, oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my Goaaaad! It’s starting to look like a triple rainbow!”

“What does this mean?

(weeping) It’s a double complete rainbow, in my front yard.”

According to the cover story of the latest Time Magazine (16 August 2010), researchers at the Great Ape Trust have managed to teach a bonobo called Kanzi over 384 words and are shedding streams of light on the subject of animal intelligence. This all seems eerily like the plot of that 90’s “classic” Congo (and we all know how well that turned out).

Granted Kanzi’s no Nobel Prize winner, but he can tell you stuff. He uses a flip chart and points at symbols, indicating what he wants to convey. So if he wants to offer you a Black Label, he’ll point at a vomiting man and then at you.

Now anyone knows that monkeys are quite smart, as animals go. But now we are learning just how smart animals really are. This concerns me. I mean I love animals. I find them absolutely delicious. In fact, I won’t eat anything unless it once had a face.

But we’ve already learnt that squids are clairvoyant (Damn that bastard squid! Damn you, Spain!), and soon I’ll be learning that what would have been cooked medium-rare is now reading Aristotle’s “On the Soul”. I don’t want to know any of this. I want a world where I’m top of the food chain, literally.

So, bottom line, if an animal can’t physically catch, cook and eat me, it’s for lunch.

As we are heading into the round of 16 of the FIFA World Cup, I feel obliged to post something that resembles a Blatant article, considering the demise of this blog seems likely.

Thankfully I didn’t hold out too much hope for Bafana Bafana in any case. I did, however, find myself uttering a few profanities when France scored that effing goal and I knew for sure that our ship was sunk. That being said, my eggs always lay in two other baskets: USA and the Netherlands. And I am proud to say that both of my baskets are through to the round of 16, unlike France and Italy. Cough, cough.

Now, like most of my compatriots, I bought into the “I was there” hype and spent R140 on my category 4 ticket for the England vs. USA game. We left Pretoria with plenty of time to spare and followed our noses (or rather, my Garmin) to Rustenburg for the game. I was assured that the Park ‘n Ride facilities would be easy to find, but I must admit that we did manage to get lost a couple of times. So either we are idiots or the organisers didn’t do a very good job of signposting. I prefer to think it’s the latter. After a few wrong turns and a fair amount of traffic, we finally found ourselves at the R104 East Park ‘n Ride facility in Rustenburg. We walked a fair distance to the buses, which were practically empty, and we found ourselves singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” along with a large group of American supporters on our way to the stadium. Thankfully we came prepared. Large American flags: Check. Revolutionary war flags and banners: Check. USA-appropriate attire: Check. Multiple printouts of US national anthem: Check.

When we arrived at the stadium, which I must say is quite a distance from the parking lot, we faced our first real challenge: trying to sneak in our non-regulation banner. You see, FIFA’s website clearly states that a flag may not exceed 2m in length, and the poles may not exceed 1cm in diameter. Our problem was a 4m-long banner with 2cm-thick plastic poles. This turned out not to be a problem at all, as the official at the entrance took no notice. I then walked through the metal-detectors with my bag on my back (due to poor instructions from the aforementioned official). She looked at me, annoyed, and said “You were supposed to put your bag on the tab… oh never mind.” So, to cut a short story even shorter, my bag was never searched. Great security.

Once inside the stadium everything was pretty well organised and I can’t complain too much, except for the minor fact that the scoreboards and screens weren’t working. For the first game at the stadium. Did they not think that this was an important thing to get right? So we spent the game trying to identify players from our (cheap) category 4 seats, with an announcement of the time and score over the PA system every 20 minutes. How professional. But despite this rather large inconvenience, the game was thoroughly entertaining, especially considering we were directly behind Robert Green when he made his disastrous goalkeeping blunder.

After the game we were in high spirits, but we were not high on spirits, which is more than I can say for many of the other supporters. We walked past an Englishman who was urinating in the middle of the street, with his penis in one hand and a cigar in the other. One American man was so drunk that he had lost his friends and had no idea where his car was parked. Problem was, we were lost too, so we couldn’t have been much help. We came out of a different exit to where we had gone in, and the signposting was so poor that we walked for 2 kilometres in the wrong direction. We just assumed that “R104 Parking” meant that we would find our way to the R104 East Park ‘n Ride. We would have asked for directions had  there been a great presence of officials to direct us. We eventually found our way back and then took an eternity to find an empty bus. But finding a bus was only half the problem, as all the buses were headed towards the crowd, and were thus completely gridlocked. A genius must have been behind this planning. Thankfully our bus driver actually was a genius, and he did a quick U-turn and away we went. The match had ended at 10:30 and we made it back to the parking lot after midnight. It then took half an hour to exit the parking lot due to some poorly-trained FIFA-outsourced officials who seemed unable to direct the traffic in any way, shape or form.

Once we were finally on the road back to Pretoria, we made the fatal error of deciding to go to the McDonald’s in Rustenburg. We couldn’t resist the temptation of unhealthy food after a long day filled with more unhealthy food. Big mistake. I’ve never seen so many people crammed into one McDonald’s in my life. So we left, stomachs unsatisfied, and made it back into the city at 3am. Of course, that didn’t stop us from making a 3:30am McDonald’s run.

So, in a nutshell, this has been my experience of the World Cup so far, apart from a blur of Shakira lip-syncing and the Italian team members bawling like babies. And I have two things to say before the World Cup is over.  The first is, I hope that Rustenburg’s Royal Bafokeng Stadium is a little better organised for the USA vs. Ghana game that I’m going to tomorrow night. The second is, “USA!!! USA!!! USA!!!”

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