Kaptein span die seile

Boerestep.
Because we’ve been incredibly naughty and deserve all sorts of punishment, it could just be the next big thing.

You thought it was bad when Kurt Darren threw his now infamous Dans Treffer “Kaptein (span die seile)” at us. And you were right, because it was. If you have somehow managed to avoid this phenomenon thus far, well done, but prepare to join the “what has been heard cannot be unheard” club right here and now with the no expense spent official video:

Now, the musical genius of DJ Naaldekoker (that’s DJ Dragonfly to us rooineks), has taken arguably Kurt’s most irritating famous work and set it to a dubstep beat, thus creating the genre which will be henceforth known as Boerestep.

[soundcloud]http://soundcloud.com/dj-naaldekoker/kaptein-dj-naaldekoker-remix[/soundcloud]

If this catches on – and with the current success of anything and everything dubstep, together with the continued, bewildering popularity of Afrikaans pop, I have absolutely no doubt that it might – we could be on the verge of the biggest thing to hit South African music since Craig Hinds et al released Indigo Girl, which was, quite literally, a Watershed moment.

Please forward any further examples of Boerestep to us here at 6000 miles… and we will keep the population abreast and forewarned of the advancing menace of the genre.
Prizes may be given for the best (worst) examples.

Ben loses his Mum

This is hilariously funny and also tremendously sad and moving.

I lost my mother a few days ago. Not in the way that you might lose your car keys.
Keys can be replaced. Mother’s hardly ever.

Ben Trovato is a huge favourite of mine. He went off the boil for a while a couple of years ago (IMHO anyway) but he’s been back at his best of late, although even he would be hard pressed to match his “Why, in the name of God, won’t someone bring Jacob Zuma his machine gun?” effort from 2008 (now deleted from the iol news site, but still available – at least in part – here).

Now, unless it is some great hoax – and I have absolutely no reason to believe it is – Trovato has lost his mother to cancer; an event to which he has applied his bone dry sense of humour and somehow turned it into an hilarious read: “Anyone For Chemo And A Nice Cup Of Tea?”:

Oncologists look down on everyone because they are fabulously wealthy and also because they get to play with lots and lots of human guinea pigs who eventually stop bothering them because they are too weak to pick up the phone and make another appointment.

There will be those who will be appalled that Trovato could describe his mother’s sickness and death in this way, but I disagree. Rather, to not have done so would have been hypocritical. His irreverent sense of humour means that nothing is sacred and so it is with his own family’s most difficult times. That’s courage (and an obvious continuing need to sell his books) right there.

I suspect all cancer patients ultimately face their fate with extraordinary courage and fortitude. But not all face it with the same degree of acceptance. Some go quietly. Others, like my mother, rage, rage against the dying of the light. Even after she slipped into incoherence, she was still shouting at us. I shouted back, trying to get her to take her medication. Then my sister would shout at me and my father would shout at her. It was like my childhood. Lots of shouting and nobody making any sense at all. The only difference being that I was too big for anyone to hit me.

As in many of his columns, there’s so much more to read between the lines in this one. Cut past the superficial and there’s a lot of depth there.

It’ll mean precisely bugger all to him that I offer my condolences here, but that’s fine.
I’ll keep on reading regardless.

After the calm…

It’s been enlightening and slightly amusing reading and hearing news from Cape Town today. We’re not that far away – a couple of hundred kilometres tops – and yet they seem to have been struggling with grey, wet weather there. We’ve been living it up with blue skies for most of the day, albeit with a rather dramatic (read severe gale, gusting storm force) northwester in attendance as well.

image

I digitally sucked all the colour out of that so as not to upset the folks back home too much. But the sea has been wild today. I did get some pics on the “big” camera, but I don’t have the means to easily upload them here, so that’ll have to wait till we return home tomorrow.
I’m not sure how good they will be anyway, as I was constantly fighting to keep the sea spray off the lens. And constantly losing too.