Extra vooma for your daily Diski Dance!
This chirpy little World Cup ad for the London Guardian and Observer newspapers put an extra spring in my Diski Dance this morning…
Aren’t you glad I shared that with you?
Darkness and light… and the one and only Janet Marshall takes over the airwaves!
All of you, unless you’ve been living under a rock, would have heard about Earth Hour. Come to think of it, if you do live under a rock you probably haven’t been wasting the earth’s electricity supply and resources anyway – so you’re excused. Well done. And be careful when you light candles next to your rock and don’t set the veld alight.
The rest of you know all about Earth Hour and how important it is to be aware of how we abuse our natural resources by using electricity like it’s going out of fashion. Which, along with Eskom, Crocs and Lady Gaga, I hope will.
OK. Now listen up. If you are going to be celebrating Earth Hour (8.30pm-9.30pm) on Saturday night – read all about it here – there’s only one place to do it. Stanford, Western Cape, South Africa.
Yes, that’s Stanford. Twenty-three kilometres beyond Hermanus, driving away from Cape Town towards um, oh yes, Gansbaai. You’ll be hearing a lot more from me about the sublime village of Stanford but, wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. Be patient, OK? OK.
I’m here to tell you that you had better at least switch all your lights off at the appointed hour or, even better, join all Stanfordians on the Village Green for a memorable night of darkness, light, the moon, market, food and all that jazz that Nadia Pheiffer has kindly arranged for us.
You don’t have to be ridiculous about it. If you live in Kakamas or Cairo, we’re not expecting you to drive all the way to Stanford but, if you do, I’ll personally buy you a restorative Fanta Grape at the Stanford Arms.
Right. Movie time. While I fiddle with the projector, get out the popcorn, switch the lights off and enjoy…
Check? That was an ad, right? So you don’t have to go waving your Woolies duvet cover outside your window. Adpeople get a bit carried away sometimes. They’re just illustrating a point. A point I feel very passionate about. Like Stanford. Very passionate. And, while we’re on the subject, let me introduce you to Janet Marshall. Hatpeople, meet Janet, Janet meet my loyal and long-suffering Hatpeople. Cool. Here we go…
There she is! Janet Marshall. Effervescence personified. And as sharp as a lemon.
Now there’s a lot I could tell you about Janet. Suffice to say that, to many of us Janet and Stanford go together like bacon and eggs, like a fire and a jolly good Raka red, like… OK, you get my drift.
Now the thing you really need to know about Janet is that she is as passionate about Stanford, its people, its vibe and its potential as a tourist destination as Julius Malema is about talking crap and pissing everybody off. Which is pretty passionate, isn’t it?
OK. So here’s a heads-up for you folk lucky enough to be reading about this for the very first time. Janet’s going to be on Whale Coast FM radio between 12 and 1pm tomorrow (today if you’re reading this on Friday), making her debut as the host of a new slot devoted to what people can do if they come to the Overstrand area for a weekend or a week or, if they’re really lucky, a month.
Which, you may be totally gobsmacked to know, is a lot. Tomorrow’s show (we’ve established that that means Friday, right?) is dedicated to, yes, Stanford. Well, Stanford and Earth Hour and the general vibe that’s coming out of your favourite Overberg village these days (read “red-hot”).
You’ll be equally gobsmacked (and perhaps horrified) to learn that she’s chosen me to banter away the hour with her. Don’t ask. I don’t know. Perhaps everybody else is busy trimming their fingernails at 12pm tomorrow or something.
Never mind. I’ll do my best to keep up with the highly effusive, engaging, totally rad raconteur that is Ms Marshall. I like a challenge. OK. 12pm. Friday. Whale Coast FM. 96.0mz. Tune in. Or I’ll be tuning you.
How a clever ad campaign is helping to stop the “bloody” scourge of landmines…
Here at the Bush Palace, our “Control Tower” for the Heart & Sole Tour to raise awareness of landmines, we hold a great fondness for brilliant advertising.
So when an ad campaign comes along which is both ingeniously executed and highlights the man-made and totally unnecessary scourge of despicable landmines, we are doubly chuffed.
Witness this clever little concept dreamt up by the bright young things at a New Zealand advertising agency, Publicis Mojo on behalf of an anti-landmines organisation called CALM…
OK, So you tear the tomato sauce (ketchup) sachet and "blood" spurts out of the young boy's foot. Cleverness overload!
What do you make of that? Sharpness, hey? I think that it’s good to know that some people in New Zealand are thinking about something other than rugby. And making such a powerful point about landmines. Which affect the lives of somebody somewhere on our planet every 19 minutes of the day and night.
Which is why unicyclist Geoff “Heartman” Brink and I are soon to head off on the 1,700km from Durban to Cape Town to raise further awareness of landmines. Well, Heartman will be pedalling his AmaOneWheel and I’ll be driving behind him, watching his back and blogging all about it. Right here. On this blog.
We’re doing a seriously intensive ride down the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast next week so, if you see us on the road, feel free to give us a nice, quiet and encouraging thumbs-up. Just don’t draw up alongside my unicyclist in your car and hoot… Old Heartie tends to fall off and scrape his knees when people do that! Then I’ve got to stop, get out of the truck and administer a Mickey Mouse plaster to his wounds. And stop the ooze of “ketchup”!
True love is cemented by a kiss (with the aid of chewing gum)
I shall have to summon an emergency meeting of The Hatman Mansions Social/Sexual Interaction Committee to urgently review my longstanding policy of never kissing a woman while she has chewing gum in her gob. That’s all I have to say on this…
This ad of stunning epicness is by Del Campo Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Buenos Aires, Argentina for TopLine chewing gum, with soundtrack by Carolina Daian. I would like to thank/apologise to jolly good chap Chris Rawlinson as I unashamedly nicked this little gem off his Gentlemen\'s Log, so named because it is an altogether far more refined affair than the tawdry content I blog about. Grovelness.
Lingerie poster too saucy for Durban
It’s not easy being the City Manager of Durban.
You have to make lots of tough decisions in the best interests of your ratepayers and you’re almost constantly vilified by public and press alike.
You stump up big dosh to have Durban’s Waterfront built, which necessitates the removal of ancient institutions with aquatic interests. Bang! You get whacked. You have the beautiful old Dolphinarium knocked down and approve the construction of uShaka Marine World, which immediately starts losing money hand over fin. Bang! You get whacked.
You rename loads of Durban’s streets, formerly named after the outrageously racist settlers who masterminded the building of Durban, after Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Humpty Dumpty. Bang!
In a heroic effort to ensure that the descendants of those nasty settlers never again have their grass verges trimmed outside their homes in previously hugely advantaged “white suburbia”, you demand that refuse hardly ever gets removed from those areas, that “loadshedding” be assiduously implemented and that the once pristine beachfront (and adjacent Indian Ocean) is left to go to such rack and ruin that nobody with more than a bean in their pocket and a slightly-above-zero-valuation of their lives ever goes there again. Bang! Whack!
If that weren’t enough, you diligently oversee the gradual degradation of almost everything of any worth to anybody, including the destruction of the street traders’ market at Warwick Junction for yet another shopping mall. Bang! Whack! Wham!
No, it’s not an easy ride for the good DOCTOR Michael Sutcliffe, who is just doing his best for Durban. Then, he sees this:
Shock! Horror! Outrage! What will our children think?
So you ban it. Well, what else could you, the moral guardian of all things good about Durban, do? This is not Cape Town, for Helen’s sake! Oops. Should have seen it coming. Bang! Whack! Kapow! *Good kicking in the gonads* Here follows a letter from one of those arty-farty liberals who’s always whingeing about something, this time about the banning of his grotesquely hard-porn poster advertising some smutty play he’s putting on:
