Long live Drew Patrick

I really enjoyed my time being that Drew Patrick persona. I made loads of new blogging friends and managed to scoot up most of the blogging rankings by taking pot shots at other bloggers. But a blog is a vampire – it sucks the time out of the day and believe it or not I am a rather busy and overworked individual. On the other hand I believe that it is important to have a platform where one can express oneself even if its only to a one eyed monk with dial-up in Tibet. With this in mind I think I’m going to keep this WordPress blog going and dump the other one. I prefer being Spencer to Drew – Drew is just a little too slick and easy for my liking, kind of like the guy that would dump a girl after getting to third base. Spencer on the other hand is a tad more erudite and articulate, and whilst his writing skills leave a lot to be desired he has the ability to get noticed and put forward some lucid comment about current issues here in South Africa without getting bogged down with most of the usual blogging baggage. Spencer is also one of the good guys, a few recent events in our local blogging community have shown that there are some very unsavory characters out there…blogging. A counter balance is required. With this post I officially resurrect Spencer. Be warned ye.

Bullard Fired!

Vindictive ANC Members to Blame? Sources at the Ministry for funny words and oversight on bad grammar tell me that the intrepid columnist of note was muscled out of his position as chief Times bloggomite by vindictive office bearing ANC politicians. Being forced to cruise the highway between their Hyde Park mansions and Pretoria’s Union Buildings in measly BMW X5′s and Range Rover Sportiques is no fun they say, whilst not only is Bullard sniping at them with a double barreled medium he is also is banging away in Bugatti’s and humping Hummers down Tyrone Avenue in Parkview most weekdays.

ANC Politicians cannot afford lifestyles any more – As an added insult they say, Bullard’s presence in the so called Golden Circle of Johannesburg’s most affluent suburbs has caused property prices to skyrocket forcing these same politicians to steal even more public funds to assist them in the ongoing relocation of relatives and livestock from rural Transkei villages to neighbouring mansions in Sandown’s infamously priced Fricker road. Fricker road residents are already up in arms over a recently completed Mexican themed Sorghum Brewery at the bottom of the leafy lane which on any given weekend draws an estimated 10’000 township revelers to its grassy lawns. Ritual livestock sacrifices are also common practice yet occur mainly on Wednesday evenings.

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.

A slow day keeps the dread disease away…

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…

Blogging Wastes Electricity

There are a ton of anti – ESKOM and protest blogs popping up, each with its own unique perspective on our power crisis. I must say that I have not really felt the impact of the electricity shortage having only been plunged into darkness once, around two weeks ago. Perhaps a few ESKOM executives live in my neighborhood.

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.

The Trouble with Bloggers

Bloggers definitely conform to a caste system, on the one hand we have the Geeks that blog about things that most people don’t have the foggiest clue about, yet they still shoot into the top 20 ranking on Amatomu with posts titled “ the fundamental design of methane powered toilet flushers”. Either the blog readers are all geeks or there is a very busy blog-bot out there. These Gloggers think that they are at the top of their games and they ooze geeky success like Old Spice.

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.

Le Resistance’

Ever wonder why when visiting that pretentious,overpriced dump that is Franschoek there are so many French Restaurants? Restaurants with faux cuisine names like Bouillabaisse, Chamonix and Monneaux? Its all got to do with the revocation of the Edict on Nantes in 1685. Google it, I don’t have the patience to explain it, but basically the Catholics made kuk in France and a boat load of scruffy and smelly Frenchmen disembarked in Die Kaap towards the end of the 17th century.

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!”

The last word on Fidentia

A while back I did some work (albeit briefly) in the Asset Management Industry and the senior people I met and interacted with were without a doubt heavyweights. These were guys who spent their school days cracking A’s, Playing first team rugby and attending chess club, whilst I was happily ensconced under a bush behind the tennis courts with a packet of Chesterfields, a 5 Litre happy box and Candi Mc******. When I say heavyweights I mean, studious, serious, quiet individuals who have MBA’s and other degrees in Actuarial Science and Economics and whose parents never thought to administer them Ritalin like Jelly Tots. But enough about my inability to hold onto a thought for longer than a second. Lets discuss someone who has an alleged inability to hold onto a million bucks for longer than a second. Arthur Brown from Fidentia.

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.