Watch your cheese

After the young firebrands such as Malema and Shivambu have had their say, in steps “oily creature” Andile Lungisa, ex deputy-Pres of the ANCYL and now chairman of the National Youth Development Agency, with his loud words and hot air. Well, mainly hot air, anyway.

In a speech at the Black Management Forum young professionals’ summit in Cape Town last week, he threatened the usual people (“Stellenbosch mafia”, government, the DA etc etc etc) with the  usual stuff: We will make SA ungovernable, we will close every street, blah, blah, blah.

And then he threatened something else that made everyone sit up and notice:

If there is a cheese in your fridge, they are going to take it

They’re going to what?!?
Look, as much as I like my countries governable and my streets open, I can manage for a short while if things have to change. But when you start threatening to take the cheese from my fridge?
Well, that’s going a bit too far, Mr Lungisa.

Why not rather begin at Checkers with their much-advertised Cheese World? After all, they bring you more than 400 cheeses to choose from. I’ve just had a quick peek in my fridge and all I’ve got is a bit of week-old Gouda.
Mind you, maybe it doesn’t actually matter what sort of cheese it is, maybe any cheese will do? (There’s a song in there, somewhere…)
Will the issues you have raised only be sorted by a decent Gruyere or a mature Roquefort? Do younger fridge raiders have to go for the Mini Babybels? So many questions.
Anyway, if it’s going to take something a little different to pacify you, Checkers say that if you can’t find the cheese you’re looking for, they’ll find it for you.

Once they’ve got the requisite cheese in their fridge, then you can go and take it.

I accept that youth unemployment is a big issue in SA and that it desperately needs addressing, but I fail to see how the theft of dairy products from private individuals is going to assist this cause. If the youth really do need cheese, why not help them out with a bit of brie bought with some of the R350,000,000 that the SA government gave your organisation this year?
Maybe chuck some cheddar in from your fat R800,000 annual salary, Andile.
I daresay that you might be able to sling in a couple of Salticrax their way as well (after payday, obviously).

But you leave my cheese alone, right?

Sorry. That last line may have seemed a little threatening, angry; a little hot-headed.
But that’s my week old Gouda, ok?
Look, as a gesture of goodwill, Andile, I have signed your email address up for the cheese.com “The #1 resource for all things cheese” “It’s all about the cheese!” newsletter.
I trust that with their expert assistance, you and your organisation can remedy this country’s ills within no time at all.
Good luck.

Do try to keep up

Have you read Fikile Mbalula’s speech from the Economic Freedom in our Lifetime lecture last night?

If not, why not? You are lagging behind. Do try to keep up.

Speaking on the subject of the (proposed?) nationalisation of the mining industry and, in this excerpt, specifically on those who are against such a plan, he said:

It is of paramount importance that revolutionaries should soberly engage the ANC Youth League. This engagement should be based on answering the fundamental question:
“To what extent does the slogan ‘economic freedom in our lifetime’ link strategically to the slogan for ‘freedom in our lifetime’?”

These questions are of pivotal importance because if the entire mass democratic movement fails in its conviction to see a symbiotic link between the two slogans in this era of the National Democratic Revolution, and rather settle for isolating one at the expense of the other, this will, to my mind, be equal to an intellectual and ideological disservice on the side of the movement as a whole.

However, we are fully aware of a tendency that attempted to dislodge the content of the National Democratic Revolution by among other things, dismissing race as less important a social category in contemplating any social progress.

At the same time, we were aware of the ultra-leftist tendencies that were aimed at uplifting pseudo-Marxist predispositions at the expense of the revolutionary recognition of the symbiotic link between national liberation and social emancipation; born out of the acknowledgement of the inter-play between the national oppression and class exploitation; in the context of the National Democratic Revolution.

Yeah. What he said. You’d better believe it.
And extra points for getting the all important “tendency” in there.

Basically, for those of you at the back, I think that he’s having a bit of a pop at Blade Nzimande – “that bloke from the SA Communist Party”  – who, as we’ve seen before, isn’t adverse to a little bit of hyperverbosity (aimed right back at Fikile’s chums) himself.

It seems that when it comes to insulting one’s allies through the means of speeches or statements filled with ridiculously extreme,  hyphen-laden, politically-related adjectives, the members of the tripartite alliance have got it sorted.

Shot through the heart (and amazon.co.uk is to blame)

So sang 80’s hair rockers Bon Jovi. In a manner of speaking, anyway.

But I’m actually referring to accurately-targeted email advertising. Specifically this one:

Hello Mr 6000,

Are you looking for something in our Tablet PCs store? If so, you might be interested in these items.

Asus EeePad Transformer TF101 10.1 inch Tablet PC (nVidia Tegra2 1GHz, 1Gb, 16Gb eMMC, WLAN, BT, Android 3.0) with docking station and keyboard


RRP: £429.99
Price: £418.13 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery.
(See details and conditions)
You Save: £11.86 (3%)
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk.
Gift-wrap available.

Yes. Yes, I am interested. Very interested. And you damn well know it, because I spend several hours a day gazing at the tablet porn on your site.
Specifically this little baby.

I have checked out her stats, I have checked out the 3% discount, I have checked out the fact that gift wrap is available.
Yes: gift wrap.

The fact is that I had previously thought that I was immune to this sort of advertising. But they’ve hit the spot here and they know that I will click their links and gaze upon her wonder again and again. And eventually I will be worn down and I will submit and I will part with my hard earned Rands and I will have her.

This happens so rarely to me that I can’t even remember it happening before. Except when I moved to SA after a whole week’s pressure from my wife. And since that seems to have worked out so well, I see no reason that this one won’t end happily as well. (Are you reading this, dear?)

UPDATE: And this is why I need it:

Exactly.

Iceland whale tourism idea is brilliant

Iceland. Land of ice. And volcanoes. And financial ruin (like everywhere else these days). And puffins.

They’ve come up with another gem of an idea to attract visitors to their lump of rock: Whale watching – with a twist.
You get to eat what you see.

Watching and hunting whales “work perfectly together” in a look-and-cook combo of tourism and gastronomy, Iceland’s Whale Commissioner said on Thursday at the global whaling forum.
“Many of the tourists that go on whale watching tours go to restaurants afterwards to taste whale meat,” said Tomas Heider, speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in the British Channel Islands.

Iceland have a “Whale Commissioner”. That’s brilliant. And so is his idea, despite what others may say:

Many countries in the 89-nation IWC, especially in South America, argue that potential income from tourism far outstrips the value of commercial whaling, and that the two do not mix well.
But in Iceland, Heider insists, the industries feed off each other.
“Even though we have been increasing our whaling in recent years, the tourists are streaming in numbers to Iceland and going to whale watching tours like never before,” he said. “It works perfectly together.”

Of course, we’d never, ever, ever think of doing something so vulgar in South Africa, would we?

Unless of course you’ve ever been to Oudtshoorn, the self-proclaimed “Ostrich Capital of the World”, where you can see, feed, ride and then eat the local birdlife.

I trust that anyone commenting negatively on the News24 article or writing an angry letter to the IWC (on recycled paper with a recycled pen) will also be contacting Western Cape Tourism and complaining bitterly about these same heinous practices taking place on our own doorstep.

Disclosure: 6000 eats ostrich most weeks and has also tasted whale meat on two occasions. He was unimpressed.

Pining for nuts

Let it never be said that life here in South Africa is easy. Sure, the weather is ridiculously good, despite this being midwinter, and the views, the expats and the beer are utterly spectacular, but there are always difficulties as well. I’m talking about allegations of corruption in Government, violent strikes in the engineering sector, petrol shortages and the price of pine nuts.

Yes, C Emily Dibb of Muizenburg has written in to everyone’s favourite letters page in the Cape Times and is very upset about how much pine nuts cost here in Mzansi. I feel her views deserve airing  – and indeed comment – here on 6000 miles…

Pining for nuts

On a recent visit to Turkey, I was captivated to find how many of their traditional dishes contain pine nuts; they are an integral part of many of their meat-ball recipes.

From this opening line, we can make several deductions. Firstly, that C Emily Dibb has recently visited Turkey, secondly that she is captivated by the weirdest things and thirdly that many traditional Turkish dishes are meat-ball based. (This last one is a bit of an assumption, but I’m sticking with it.)

I’ve never been to Turkey, but a quick search online reveals that there are many more captivating things in that country than the percentage of local ground beef recipes which contain pine nuts. I found articles on historically varying architecture, bewitchingly fascinating geothermal spas and hugely concerning foreign policy.
I found nothing about meat-balls. Nothing particularly captivating, anyway.

Emily continues:

Hoping to try some of these myself on my return home, I looked for pine nuts in the supermarket, and was staggered to find that they cost nearly R50 for 100g – a shattering R500/kg.

Before we go any further, I must congratulate C Emily Dibb on not using any exclamation marks in that last sentence. This is the mark of a true writer; one who was brought up in the old school when ZOMG! wasn’t an acceptable way of conveying acute surprise and the surcharge on punctuation put it beyond many people’s means.
Because C Emily Dibb is acutely surprised. In fact, as you may have read above, she is staggered, which is two rungs further up the astonishment ladder from acute surprise (just beyond plainly shocked).
Emily C Dibb also demonstrates that she is from the old school of mathematics as well, with that effortless extrapolative calculation to the standard economic unit of pricing, the Rand per Kilo value. I bet she did that in her head. You? You needed a calculator.

But point taken, Emily C Dibb. Pine nuts are expensive.

In Turkey, the pine nuts are produced in Anatolia on estates that grow nothing but the Mediterranean umbrella pine.
Are we missing a good trick here?

These final two lines score highly on the my scale of what an ideal letters page letter should contain, that is, a meaningless fact and an utterly obscure question. These elements have featured widely before, including the sublime:

My house reeks of your cat, and it is very embarrassing.

What is C Emily Dibb proposing here, exactly? That the local agricultural industry move over from its staples of mielies, sugar, grain and grapes and concentrates solely on a niche product from Eurasia in order to bring her recent holiday’s culinary memories closer to being within her financial grasp? Has she really thought this through? Because where would that leave our economy, with particular reference to duties on wines and spirits and export of produce to our neighbouring countries? Is she honestly suggesting that ever last hectare of South Africa’s 146,5224.44km² of arable farmland be devoted to the growing of the Mediterranean umbrella pine?

Sure, that’s enough pine nuts for a great many Turkish meatballs (I was going to do some rudimentary calculations, but the yield of the Mediterranean umbrella pine is hugely variable, as I’m sure you’re aware), but with supply and demand weighted heavily on the supply side of things, the international pine nut market will surely crash and we will be left destitute and economically ruined – even before Julius Malema has had his way. There are no by-products in the Mediterranean umbrella pine, save for, presumably, umbrellas [are you sure? Please check this before we publish – Ed] and we don’t need umbrellas here.

You’ll get your meat-balls. Oh yeah. You’ll get your memories of your holidays with the wrestlers, the architecture and the increasing Syrian refugee problem. You’ll get all of that, C Emily Dibb, and I’m sure you’ll find a myriad of pine nut containing dishes to be captivated by while the country is starving albeit well sheltered from precipitation.

No, C Emily Dibb. I reckon that if you can afford a holiday to Turkey, you can afford fifty bucks for 100g of your beloved and captivating pine nuts. And you can fiddle and fine tune your recipe to use less of this pricey and scarce imported ingredient and get to nibble on as many meaty balls as your heart desires, while not destroying the livelihood of the good farmers of this country with your megalomaniacal, Nazi plan to force them into growing one single, useless (save for addition to traditional Anatolian foodstuffs) crop.