The Killers tickets “sold out”

Golden Circle tickets for The Killers’ Jo’burg concert at the Coca-Cola Dome on Friday 4th December have sold out – barely two hours after officially going on sale. Recession? What recession?
However, at the time of writing, Golden Circle tickets for the Cape Town concert on the 6th at the Val de Vie Polo Estate are still available.

There are many reasons why this dichotomy exists. Perhaps the greater numbers of tickets available for a larger venue, less demand, financial concerns or – most likely –  the fact that most Capetonians haven’t actually got around to heading onto the Computicket website, because it’s Friday, dude and the weekend actually started last night.
Jo’burgers will have been up at 3 to avoid the traffic and, having arrived at work at 7, will have proceeded to buy their tickets immediately before doing that filing, writing those reports and sms’ing each other about how great it was to have a thunderstorm last night and did you see the clouds that looked like a spaceship and there was lightning and how summer is almost here with it’s lovelyrain and hail.
These things make them happy, which is not great, because everyone knows that a happy Jo’burger is annoying.

You can tickets via Computicket for both concerts. I notice that Computicket have now officially labeled the Cape Town gig as “Paarl”, which is technically more accurate. The Killers’ official website is sticking with “Cape Town”, though. Probably because Americans don’t even know where South Africa is (there’s a hint in the name, guys), let alone Paarl.

I have mine. I know others who have theirs. You’d surely be silly to miss out.

Clarkson on Jozi

Jeremy Clarkson has been to Johannesburg.
And he didn’t get mugged, hijacked, shot, stabbed or killed in any way whatsoever.

I could reproduce the whole article here, but I won’t – click his name if you want that.
Meanwhile, here’s just a little taster.

Jo’burg has a fearsome global reputation for being utterly terrifying, a lawless Wild West frontier town paralysed by corruption and disease. But I’ve spent quite a bit of time there over the past three years and I can reveal that it’s all nonsense.

“Pah,” said the armed guard who’d been charged with escorting me each day from my hotel to the Coca-Cola dome where I was performing a stage version of Top Gear.

Quite why he was armed I have absolutely no idea, because all we passed was garden centres and shops selling tropical fish tanks. Now I’m sorry, but if it’s true that the streets are a war zone, and you run the risk of being shot every time you set foot outside your front door, then, yes, I can see you might risk a trip to the shops for some food. But a fish tank? An ornamental pot for your garden? It doesn’t ring true.

Look Jo’burg up on Wikipedia and it tells you it’s now one of the most violent cities in the world . . . but it adds in brackets “citation needed”. That’s like saying Gordon Brown is a two-eyed British genius (citation needed).

Check the comments – he’s got all the ex-pats into a frenzy. “You didn’t go to Hillbrow”, “You were reading the wrong newspapers”, “You had a guard” etc etc etc. Bless. They hate the fact that they might lose some sympathy points over in Blighty or Ozland when people read this. I’d guess that the most annoying thing for them is that he’s independent, has no agenda here, no need to take one side nor the other – oh – and well read.
Ooh – that’s quite a lot of annoying things. You can see why they’re all upset. 
So well done for speaking truthfully, Jezza.

Now – if you’d just let me walk around your lighthouse, we’d all be sorted.

Thanks to MrShallowEndDiver for the heads-up