OUT TO LUNCH

It seems as though ten hours of power outages every day is the new normal but it’s increasingly likely that, before too long, we will look back with affection to the time when we only had ten hours of power outages a day.

Things certainly don’t seem to be getting better and when our newly appointed Minister of Electricity gives a dire Game of Thrones warning that “winter is coming” you can be pretty sure that the hot smelly stuff is about to really hit the whirring (solar powered) fan blades. As Peter Bruce wrote in Business Day last week, “Be afraid, it’s going to get worse before it gets worse”.

Not that you would have ever guessed this from Pres Frogboiler’s address to more than 1000 delegates at an investment conference held in darkest Sandton last week. What on earth were these delegates hoping to hear I wonder?

Nothing that comes out of the Frogboiler's mouth is designed to instill any confidence in the South African economy.

Even one time praise singer Peter Bruce now acknowledges that. Those that did battle through the traffic congestion (no lights again) may well have had nothing better to do that morning or they may just have been looking for a good laugh to go with the tea and biscuits. In which case they wouldn’t have been disappointed. How about this Frogboiler gem? ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

“We are on a long journey to rebuild our country and recover the ground that we lost despite the challenges we have. Recovery will take time to accomplish. We are confident that we will recover.”

Rebuild our country??? Are you avin’ a larf mate? In almost thirty years your party has destroyed the health service, the education system, the mining industry and key state owned enterprises. We no longer have a functioning railway network. We no longer even have something as basically third world as a functioning post office. We no longer have a functioning police force. You brag that we have 18 million people receiving welfare grants as if that were something to be proud of.

Scrap metal thieves can fell electricity pylons and get away with it. The roads are a mess in some of the largest cities in South Africa and heaven knows how many municipalities are now bankrupt and non-functioning. The ground that you say you lost was all your own doing.

While the ANC and its cronies were busy stealing from the rest of us things fell apart and you all just sat back and enjoyed your tax payer funded lifestyles; the massive salaries, the rent free homes, 24 hour security, multiple luxury cars, free travel, generators while you did bugger all.

If South Africa remains, in your words, “an ideal investment destination” I’d love to know what you would consider to be a disastrous investment destination.

***

The world gets steadily madder by the day it seems. Nike have now employed a mentally disturbed twenty-something man called Dylan Mulvaney from California (where else?) who enjoys dressing up and behaving as a teenage girl to model their sports bra.

Now, despite being allegedly on hormone treatment for the past year, this woefully skinny trans individual shows no sign of having any busty substances (to quote the late, great Peter Cook) so maybe the dosage needs to be upped.

Not surprisingly women are outraged that a male is being paid a large amount of money to model an item of clothing exclusively made with women in mind. But this is what happens when woke academics and an influential mass media decide to agree that there are 73 genders at the very least.

It may be worth noting that this doesn’t seem to be a dilemma that affects countries like Russia, China, North Korea or any of the strictly Muslim countries.

Mulvaney also hit the news headlines last week when it was revealed that the brewing giant AB InBev had sponsored him/her/them to promote Bud Light which is apparently a popular beer in the USA and more usually associated with rather more masculine role models.

As any beer lover who knows anything about the Budweiser brand can tell you, Bud Light is no more a real beer than Dylan Mulvaney is a real woman so sending a case of beers so that he/she/they could celebrate 365 day of transitioning to become a woman is probably one of the dumbest woke marketing plans ever.

Not surprisingly the fall out amongst more traditional Bud Light fans was huge with many posting videos on social media of them destroying their stocks of Bud Light but more significant was the financial fall out with shares in Anheuser-Busch down over 5% which represented a loss of $4.56 billion in market capitalisation according to Dow Jones Market Data group.

Of course, all this will pass and the share price will rise again when the fury and excitement has died down but it does suggest that woke virtue signaling on the part of corporates is becoming a bit tiresome for the 95% (at least) of the world’s population who are quite happy with the bodies they have been given and aren’t searching the internet for urgent modifications.

***

While on the subject of corporate wokeness the Daily Telegraph revealed last week that the publisher Penguin Random House in the UK is about to censor the Jeeves and Wooster books by P G Wodehouse. Penguin apparently employ ‘sensitivity readers’ and it is their job to go through great works of literature and remove anything that may be ‘triggering, ‘problematic’ or ‘potentially offensive’ to a modern reader.

Penguin already issues warnings in current print runs of the Jeeves books warning readers that some of the themes and characters may be ‘outdated’ and that it may be a good idea to lay in a small stock of smelling salts before you start reading. Other authors to suffer the purge of Bowdlerization include Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie but it’s difficult to see quite what all of this achieves. Are the publishers simply virtue signaling to appease the younger and more philistine members of staff; those with multiple body piercings and bright green hair?

Or are they generally concerned that if they don’t put a warning on the book cover that somebody will hire a lawyer, take them to court and sue them for trauma damage?

As a huge fan of the books of P G Wodehouse (as was the legendary Christopher Hitchens) I strongly object to any tinkering around with the original text, even if the story line does remain the same. Pretty soon things will get worse. Some publishing nanny will decide that Bertie drinks too much and behaves badly at the Drones club and will want that edited out.

Then some lefty loony will come to the conclusion that Jeeves is the personification of all the oppressed servant classes that have ever existed and demand that he be rewritten as less subservient in future editions. Of course, the answer is now at our finger tips and thanks to AI’s ChatGPT4 we can conjur up a Jeeves and Wooster novel that will satisfy the wokest of them all……

Jeeves and the Rude Awokening

It was a bright morning in Belgravia and the sun was streaming through the bedroom window when Jeeves shimmered in with the refreshing early morning cup of tea.

“What ho Jeeves” I greeted him, “ A splendid morning” “It is indeed sir” he said, opening the curtains.

Touching on the matter of my man Jeeves, it has to be said that he is someone of few words although the words are always well chosen. He does eat a tremendous amount of fish though and I’m certain that is what keeps his brain so healthy. The fellow can quote huge chunks of the classical authors, chaps like Shakespeare and so on, and if one is at a loss for a word Jeeves will supply that word in a jiffy.

On this particular morning I wanted to broach a rather sensitive subject and as I sucked down a mouthful of the early morning elixir I turned the matter over in my mind. And having turned it once I decided to turn it again.

“Shall I lay out our grey houndstooth suit sir with a suitably sober coloured tie” said Jeeves as he cast a disapproving eye over a particular fetching Safari suit in finest blue polyester that I had purchased on my last trip to South Africa.

“No Jeeves, that won’t be necessary”

“Well maybe the beige trousers and our sports jacket then with brown Oxford brogues?”

“Leave the Wooster adornments where they are Jeeves or, better still, distribute them among the poor. I have an announcement to make. I know this may come as a shock to someone who prides himself on being a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ but I realise that I have been trapped in the wrong body all these years. So, immediately after breakfast I am off to Harley Street to begin my journey to womanhood”

You could have heard a pin drop. But after a few moments a visibly shaken Jeeves composed himself.

“Indeed Sir. That’s most distressing news”