Winter Ball

So here's a story for you. And it's a true one.

Some weeks ago, the most marvelous, tallented Lauren Shantall, from the Freeworld Design Centre in Cape Town, invited me to join in a project they are working on, in aid of the Safe Spaces Campaign, which is an extra-ordinarily good cause.

The basic idea is that they asked 45 local creatives to take a simple Hope Soccer Ball that looks something like this:

And they asked us to have some fun designing on or around it. Then on the 4th August they'll auction the balls off at an awesome jam-packed event at their HQ at the Freeworld Design Centre (71 Waterkant St).
(If you've never been and you like designery stuff you should go check it out, it's awesome.)

AAAAnyway, so that's the backstory.

So for my ball idea I took a koki pen and wrote some words on the ball. And I thought it was okay, I mean it looked a little Standard Five Projecty, and it had a little smudge here and there, and the words weren't all lined up or anything, but the words were alright, and I thought all was good in the hood.

Until... I logged onto facebook and saw some of the balls that had started to come in from around town. Here are a few:

Flippen incredible right!
Absolutely magnificent, right?

So that's when I TOTALLY FREAKED OUT!

I mean, the one ball is BRONZED, for fuck's sake! They're phenomenal! They're art! I'm a writer, I can't compete with that! All I can draw is a stick figure man, and then he usually turns out looking like a horse anyway!

My ball was a disaster, there was no way I could hand it in. It was the worst possible situation. I was dead meat. A gonner. Completely screwed!

So I did what any girl in my situation would do. I pulled out my nail polish remover and some cotton wool and I scrubbed those dumb kokied words off my ball, and I thought and I thought, and I thought some more, and then I started again from scratch. And I got busy knitting.

So here's my ball, it's finally finished. It's a truly recycled ball, in every sense of the word. (If you look closely you can still see some of the words from before. I'm just hoping nobody looks too closely.)

What do you think? I call it Winter Ball:

yes, that's a pom pom on top.

I'll drop it off on Monday, and they'll auction it off on Thursday. Eep! I know it's all for a good cause, and just a bit of fun, but I really really hope Winter Ball doesn't get auctioned straight after Bronzed Ball!

Holla!

So I've recently had some really lekker book reviews and things in all sorts of magazines and newspapers for my new novel, This Way Up, which launched in May. So I thought I'd share a few over the next week or so.

This one's from fabulous Cleo Magazine. 

Click to enlarge if you'd like to read it.

Thanks Cleo Mag. 'Fun' makes me happy.

PS: This Way Up is available in all good book stores. :) (punt, punt, punt!)

Why you've got to love the internet.

You've got to love it because people on it create places like this where you can go and laugh and laugh and laugh until you fall out of your chair and fart. (Well, that didn't happen to me, but I imagine that if one had to laugh enough, that could happen.)

Zwier the wonderful sent it to me, and it's here if you want to see more:

This is a website that is full of pictures of Bassett Hounds running in slow motion. Yup, that's it. Nothing more. As I said, just Bassett Hounds running in slow motion. Here are a few:

Man, I love a 'Meme', particularly this one.
Happy wednesday my basset hounds.

Let's write a strongly worded letter, shall we?

Morning all, here's yesterday's column. Hope you enjoy.


A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

I think it’s time we all got together and wrote a strongly worded letter to whoever the boss is around here. Because I believe there are a couple of areas where we, the people of the world need to standardise a little.

Let’s take plugs for example. Is there any good reason why they can’t all just be the same? Wouldn’t that be easier? What’s with the two-pronged, three pronged, square-pronged, triangular-pronged, different-shaped vibe? And plugs also differ from country to country, so by the time you’ve finished buying adaptors, you need adaptors for your adaptors. Sure, I understand that the plug translator guy need to make a living too, so he can send all his little plug translator kids to plug translator college, but still, it seems unnecessary.

The same goes for car indicators. In some cars they’re on the right, in others on the left. You can tell a person in a new or hired car from a mile away. They’re the ones turning on the windscreen wipers every time they want to go right.

And search me for why we drive on different sides of the road in different countries. I usually spend my first three days on holiday stepping off curbs directly into the path of oncoming traffic. It’s a dangerous world out there. And not just with electronics, we have no idea how to greet each other anymore, either.

I recently went to a meeting where I bumped into a client I haven’t seen in a really long time. We worked together years ago when we were both at different companies. It was such a lovely surprise to see him, that I did something entirely inappropriate. I hugged him.

It was a very awkward moment for both of us, but by the time I realised I was making a huge mistake I’d already gone in for the hug, and it was too late to pull out of it. So we hugged like two cardboard cut outs. What I should have done instead was shake his hand warmly and professionally. It’s not like he’s my close friend or a member of my family or anything. And now I worry I’ve gone and set a precedent. Do we have to hug every time we see each other from now on, or can we revert to the handshake? There are so many different forms of greeting out there, it’s impossible to figure out what fits in where. I’m telling you, it’s time to standardise.

You can’t even rely on the simple kiss or the common handshake anymore, both of them have become massively complicated and even slightly political. First of all there are so many variations. The air-cheek kiss, the one-cheek kiss, the on-the-lips-kiss, the two-cheek kiss, and then the blimming Dutch have to go and take it a step further and do a three cheek kiss! It’s so confusing. Go in for one kiss too few and you might seem uncool, and go in for one too many and you could come off as pretentious. You also run the risk of a nose-bash if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And I never know with the handshake either. It’s such a grey area. Forgive my ignorance, I don’t want to offend anybody, but should we be doing the double wrist twist African Shake if we shake hands with a black person, or is it better to stick with the regular shake? Or if I want to be young and hip should I try doing one of those choreographed variations with the clicks, slides and slaps, or am I too old for that already?

You generally have about a split second to make your greeting decision when you see someone coming. You stand up, put out your hand for a shake, see that they’ve put out both hands for a hug, then you put out the other hand so that it seems as if you were also going in for a hug too, but by then, having noticed your body language, they’ve reverted to a handshake position. It feels like you’re playing Rock, Paper, Scissors.

So, who’s with me on the standardising thing? Maybe our letter should go something like this;

‘Dear whoever is in charge…’

Or should that be ‘To whom it may concern,…’

Or maybe it should be more casual, like; ‘Hi there,’

Or what about; ‘Hello Big Cheese’, wait, is that too informal?

Oh bugger!

Time Flies

Hi friends. So my art director Karin and I have been beavering away for the last little bit working on the new Allan Gray TV ad.

While I never really talk about advertising here, I thought I'd make an exception just this once and since we're all BFF's I thought I'd share a link to the commercial so you can get an exclusive sneak preview of it before it launches on Saturday during the rugby.

Hope you enjoy.

Just click here and you'll be directed right to it.

Get stuffed

I have written about taxidermy here before, it's a weird strange activity that I must say, I don't quite get, especially in this form. But this is too bizarre not to write about again.

One of my favourite people in Amsterdam, Zwier, sent me the link to this site. I have lots of very favourite people in Amsterdam. But I guess, when dope is freely available, everyone is your favourite people.
And then a second favourite person, Ross, sent it to me as well more recently, so i thought i'd better not piss off the blog G-ds and get moving on it.

It's a site called 'Badly Stuffed Animals' and it rocks like a big rocking thing.

There are so many to choose from, I had to literally hold myself back!

Some people are a Gazillion Miles from Normal. Who does this shit!

I know, here are two dead squirrels, let's recreate them boxing! Of course, it's so obvious! WTF?

It seems squirrels are very big in the taxidermy world. Not sure where this one is paddling to, but it might be too late for him to get away at this stage.

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaa. That's one skinny assed fox!

Poor Mr Fox. He looks like he got slammed in a door.

Fox on crack.

I'm sorry, excuse me, I beg your pardon. But is that a fox, frog jumping the world? Why yes, I believe it is. Thank you very much.

Poo Tweeting

And a jolly good monday morning to you and you and you, oh fuck who are we kidding it's a monday. 
Here's sunday's column:

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick

POO TWEETING
Nowhere are boundaries less built up, or is etiquette more forgotten than on Twitter. Twitter, for those of you who don’t do it. Yet. Is a website where you choose who you want to follow, and then you and they get to comment on anything and everything, as long as it’s in 140 characters or less. To give you an idea how much that is, I’ve put the first 140 characters of this column in pink. So essentially whatever you want to say, you need to get straight to the point, which is kind of the beauty of Twitter.

Let me break it down for you in terms of South Africa, (don’t worry, this is about as mathematical as I’ll ever get). According to the stats, about a million of us tweet right now.

And I’d say that what we tweet about is around 40% interesting, inspiring and newsworthy, 30% personal conversations you’re merely eavesdropping in on, and 30% outright over-sharing or TMI (too much information). Just to be clear, unlike that first stat, these are complete thumb sucks, based on nothing more than observation and gut feeling. So hardly stats at all really, more like dodgy guesses.

Someone I used to follow recently tweeted: ‘I’m writing this tweet while doing a poo’. Really? And we all needed to know that because?

Other tweets you’ll find on your timeline that fall into the category ‘arbitrary’, range from things like ‘I’m eating orange marmalade on rye toast for breakfast’ to ‘My husband’s cousin’s uncle turned 56 today’, or ‘Found a great parking spot just outside the Pick ‘n Pay, must be my lucky day.’ Your lucky day maybe, for the hundred or so people who follow you, not so much.

According to research, various scientists around the world have proven that we each have anything from
12 357 (such a specific number makes you think they really did prove this) to around 70 000 thoughts on a thoughtful day. And now that there’s Twitter we get to verbalise 69 992 of them. You have to wonder why we feel the need to tell everybody exactly what we’re thinking every second of every minute of every day. Are our lives that interesting?

Sure if you’re a rock star, or a professional sportsman, and you go from throwing a television set out of a hotel window, to shagging a bevy of coke-whores, to getting arrested, chances are we’ll be a whole lot more interested in hearing your running commentary (Charlie Sheen is exhibit A – he garnered over a million followers in just 25 hours). Although if you’re compos mentis enough to be able to tweet that you just drank a bottle of Jack Daniels neat and then plugged one end of a set of jumper cables to your testicles and the other end to your V8, then I’m not sure you’re drunk enough to be doing that for real, and your credibility may have just gone out the window.

In comparison I don’t think fetching the kids from soccer and then making a tuna casserole should be a spectator sport. Are we destined to forever more give too much information out to a bunch of strangers?

Or should we take off our cynical pants for a minute and instead of writing it off straight away, also take a look at the other side of Twitter too. It creates an incredible sense of community. You’re never alone if you’re on Twitter. Log on with insomnia at 4am and you’ll find twenty three other people in the same boat. Watching the Mnet movie alone on a Sunday night? Oh no you aren’t, log onto Twitter and you can watch it together with dozens of people. And not only that, but news breaks faster on Twitter than any other medium, it’s completely revolutionised the way we communicate. And need to know anything, from the square root of Pi, to who sang that song, you know the one, it goes ‘la la la, dum de dum, la la la, through the tree… something, something…’ put the question out to the Twitterverse (Twitter universe) and you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting the right answer and a few wrong but funny ones too.

Nowhere will you find more interesting people linking to more interesting things. But it’s a little like shopping in a bargain basement; you need to trawl through all the bins to find the exceptional pieces. But do it enough and after a while you get better at knowing who to follow. And then the poo tweets, or the descriptive lunch tweets become like the small commercial breaks between the information-fest that is Twitter.

Care to join me? I promise not to tweet about my bowel movements, my tuna casserole, or my best friend’s husband’s cousin’s uncle. Unless he hooks one end of his jumper cables up to his V8, and the other end you know where.

Or am I just getting old?

So as you know I get lots of amazing emails from my Sunday Times column every week. Just the other day a lady wrote to me and told me that she liked my column, but that she would like it more if I wrote a bit more about Jesus, and a little less about sex.

But last time I did that and wrote about a lady doing pole dancing for Jesus classes, I hurt some people's feelings, so I'm not going to do that again.

But I now have a new favourite person writing to me regularly. I don't know his or her name, or where they come from, but I do know this. I don't understand a word of it. Okay maybe I get every third or fourth word, but other than that I'm in the dark over here.

Here's a mail I got today. I simply copied and pasted it, no changes, no alterations, just the mail in all it's glory.

Lmao lmfao lokl uhm mmoh smilin mama mama mama ya slowin down lol or izit ya on da beach today i dnt blame ya bt anyhow da gods have spokn mwah mwah we foreva young nd im a piscean nd we gonna take ova nw sunday ya son mmmh uhm wh!ch iz me lil eazie wana see some awesum-pisceanity-lyricly-gorjizly-fishyry-godly-aquariumisly-awsum snuff nw wit diz i say thank ya 4 all youve implantd in me wit ya writng thank ya mamma and amen.4rm emmanuel lil eazy ponkaliciouz.f.crazeee thank ya and amen mwah mwah

I think it's from a he (maybe) and I think he's saying he likes my column (although I could be wrong) and that he's a pisces or maybe he's saying I should write about fish... I can't tell.

What I do know is that every single mail he sends me makes me smile and scratch my head a little at the same time.

Should we be worried about the future of our language? Probably just a little bit.

Or am I just getting old?

Things to do before you die.

Dammit, dammit, dammit, dammit!

Who's running the diary around here?

How the hell did we manage to go and miss this?

It has come to my attention that between the 29th April and 2 May this year there was an 'Elvis Festival Africa' in the Tsitsikamma, Storms River Village.

I am pissed off beyond belief, I can't believe we went and missed it.

I mean if you can't have awesome experiences at an 'Elvis Festival Africa' in the Tsitsikama, then I'm willing to guess you can't have an awesome experience anywhere!

Look here's the programme, this is what we missed:

click to enlarge

'An almost Elvis Competition' at the Protea Hotel - hoo boy sign me up and empty out my camera memory card.

And 'Garden Route's Got Talent done in an 'Elvis kind of way' kind of appeals to me too.

Hey, after enough Spook and Diesels (ie: Brandy and Coke's) everybody looks like Elvis.

Should we go next year?

Sign me up!

The WonderfulWorldofWierdness

Hi all, and good morning, hope you had a spiffing weekend. If not, no fear, you can give it another bash in five day's time. Here's yesterday's column in case you didn't quite get to it yesterday.

Much love,
xme.

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
WELCOME TO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WIERDNESS

Man, we are one screwed up bunch of humanity. Sorry, I don't mean to massively over-generalise. I’m sure you over there, reading this while you enjoy your leisurely Sunday, are a completely normal, well-balanced human being and hardly touched at all. But some people out there... we might just need to invent a crazier word for the word crazy!

Hands up if you use Wikipedia? *And much of the first world throws both hands in the air*. (For those of you who’ve never heard of it, it’s on the computer-machine-thingymajig-abobby and it’s a free online encyclopaedia of awesomeness.) I for one don't know what I'd do without it.

Remember the good old days of research? Back when it was just you and your musty old set of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s. And if you didn’t have a set at home it required a trip to the library, which you had to walk to, and it was uphill both ways. And once there you had to rendezvous with Mr Dewey and his Decimal System (which should have been called The Dewey Dismal System, sheesh it’s complicated) if you wanted to know where Uzbekistan is (Central Asia) or how big Loni Anderson's boobs are (37D before she had her reduction). Or who Loni Anderson is? (Look under ‘American actresses in dodgy sit-coms in the eighties.’)

So thank goodness for Wikipedia. But did you know that Wikipedia is not an only child? In fact it has a number of step-brothers, sisters and dodgy aunts?

Let's start with wikiFeet. The madness here is astonishing. This is a website where people who might have a couple of issues and a little too much time on their hands go to upload pictures and information on celebrity feet. True story.

According to the facts and figures on their site at the time of going to press, the wikiFeet database contains an astonishing three hundred and fifteen thousand pictures of more than nine thousand five hundred celebrity feet. And wait, that’s not all, the wikiFeet home page has been viewed well over twenty five million times.

I struggle to even begin to fathom why we might need this and which freak out there is looking at it over twenty five million times? I suppose people with foot fetishes would be my first guess? Or perhaps people who like to see what shoes celebrities wear? That would be my second, less sick and twisted guess.

But it's not an all-out crazy-gimp free-for-all over there on wikiFeet, they do have rules. One of which is the following: ‘We accept pictures that show toes, soles and arches. Shoes and socks pictures do not belong on wikiFeet.’ So maybe I'm wrong about the people on it being there for the shoes! I don't know.

Perhaps this is one of those situations where it’s best not to ask too many questions, and rather move swiftly forward onto another of the Wiki siblings...

Did you know that the Internet also has a Boobpedia? Yup, it's just like an online Encyclopaedia, but it’s for boobs. I know this because six paragraphs ago I went looking to see how big Loni Anderson's boobs are.

Or am I the last to know, and everyone else has been surfing Boobpedia for years already? Reading up about Dolly Parton and Pam Anderson (hey do you think her and Loni are related?) and finding out whose boobs are real and who’s are fake, and looking up every possible Kardashian (34D/36C/36ZZ)… oh, sorry I nodded off there for a second. Seriously, who’s got the time or the interest?

Although out of curiosity I did go looking to see if there’s an online Oxford English Dick-tionary, or an EncycloPenis Britanica, in case either exists as an extensive online catalogue of organs of the world. I’m half disappointed and half relieved to be able to report back that these sites don’t exist. Yet.

So while we’re certainly crazy, it’s seems there’s always room for more craziness. And thank goodness for that. If there weren’t so many freaks and lunatics out there, what on earth would I have to write about every week?

Cats - evil incarnate?

Okay, so I hardly ever, never ever, rarely ever do this. But I'm making an exception because of it's pure 'fuck me but that's cute factor'. Bailey, the keen teen from here sent me the following pics, in amongst some other hug chain-email crap (which I've decided to forgive her for, just this once!)

In May I wrote a post on 'Cats that sit like humans'.

Cats are a truly interesting species, and I've long been under the impression that they're:

a) more human than we think

b) trying to take over the world

and

c) have a terrifyingly large evil streak

But all that aside, it doesn't stop them being hilarious. Not in a dumb puppy kind of way, but in a far more thoughtful, calculated way.

Check these out, oh and thanks Bailey.  

Cats are like ninjas. They can sleep anywhere, anyhow, anyway.

Especially if there's a patch of sun involved.

Don't jump kitty, don't do it.

Worshipping the porcelein G-d. He clearly drank too much milk last night.

all that's missing is the cigar!

And the low-riding Mustang Convertible.

So cute we do actually need to stat him, and make two!

Shoo, I struggled to do the geography here. Which end is up?

Ooooh hot water pipesss.... mmmmmm..... i'm never moving....

Wanna see a cat move really fast. Turn on the tap.

Okay I'll stop now, this is getting ridiculous.

just one more:

He he he he he.

Was your first time your worst time?

Morning Team Monday. Hope you had a nice weekend. Brrrr ne? Okay so here's yesterday's Sunday Times Column just in case you missed it. Hope you enjoy.

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick

WAS YOUR FIRST TIME YOUR WORST TIME?

Remember the first time you had sex? And no, I don’t mean by yourself, that doesn’t count. I’m talking about when you lost your virginity. Strange term that, ‘lost your virginity’ - the word ‘lost’ conjures up the misplacement of things, like your keys or the remote control, or that other sock that goes who knows where. Why lost? It’s not like you’ll ever find it again once it’s gone. Even if you go without sex for a really, really long time, virginity definitely doesn’t grow back, I’ve tried that experiment. Once you’ve lost it, it’s gone for good.

Also, lost is that something that goes missing when you aren’t paying attention. Which is hardly a relevant term here, since the whole losing your virginity thing is generally pretty focused. How many youths spend years, some even decades, wondering when it will happen and who it will be with, and what it will be like, and they have the ancient crumbling condoms in their wallet to prove it. But despite all the thought and research that goes into The Big Event. that certainly doesn't guarantee that a good time will be had by all when the time finally... er... comes.

They say you never forget your first time, but that’s probably more for the nostalgia of it than the sheer prowess or enjoyment.

Has anyone in the history of the world ever actually had a truly satisfying or even slightly enduring first time? At best it’s a fumble in the dark with a first love, or someone really special. At worst it’s a fumble in the dark with someone only temporarily special and perhaps involving something from your parent’s liquor cabinet, like Coco Rico, Frangelico or Cane.

For the virgin guy it’s generally over quite fast, and for the virgin girl, my guess is most of us simply wish it was even faster.

But don't be too hard on yourself, you wouldn't expect someone to instantly know how to make a clay pot after only having read up on how to do it, even if they had hundreds of books on ceramics hidden under their mattress, and they looked at millions of pictures of jugs every night before bed, you still wouldn't sit them down at a pottery wheel and expect greatness the very first time. In fact you could probably expect some badly handled jugs, and a bit of a mess. That’s because you can't beat practical experience, when making love or ceramics.

I asked a couple of people on Twitter to dish about their first time. There were a whole bunch that took place in teenage bedrooms, or friend’s houses while parents were out, one in a fleabag motel, one on a deck chair in a garden, one in a tent, and an awful lot in cars. I can relate, my first time was in a car, and not even in the back seat (we were clearly more agile back then).

One friend lost hers under a Hobie Cat on a beach on holiday in Plett, another did it in a park out under the stars, which was lovely and romantic until she woke up the next morning and in the cold light of day discovered they must have rolled in dog poo while doing it, because there was a terrible smell and her coat was covered in it.

And when asked how these first times rated on a scale of one to ten, one being smug, and ten being beyond awful, most of them sat between an eight and a twelve.
So here's a more interesting question, since we clearly all remember our first time. Does anyone remember their second time? You’d think that would be the one we’d be more keen to hang onto. At least we know where everything fits by then, so there should be slightly less of the awkwardness.

Or instead of the first time being the one that’s so memorable, maybe it should be the first time that you get it right that we should remember in slow-motion detail. Whether it’s the fifth time, or the fiftieth time (hey, some people are slow learners).

So if, as they say, you never forget your first time, and you never forget how to ride a bicycle, and elephants never forget, does that mean your first time is like doing it with an elephant on a bicycle? Scarily enough, that sounds like how one of my twitter friends lost his.