Thuper thtudly thwimmer Ryk Neethling has been robbed,

twice,

in two months,

in two different homes.

His home in Joburg was robbed on June 1, then he moved to Pretoria, and got robbed again.

Unlucky.

Not too long ago Dan wanted the email functionality on his Sony Ericsson W800i to work. It was working, and then one day, without Dan changing settings or procedures or anything of the sort, it just stopped. So he decided to phone Vodacom Customer Care on 111.

After waiting for the voice prompt and rapidly pressing ’0′ for an operator, Dan waited, and waited, all this time having to be ear-raped by some awfully shitty Simply Red / Mick Hucknall song about someone breaking his heart, and if that person gets what they want, if they know what it is, and if they care. A silly song. A shit song. A song you’ll have in your head for hours after.

After a few minutes Dan was greeted by :: insert muffled name here :: and he stated his dilemma.

“Can you browse the internet?” asked the operator.
“Yes,” replied Dan.
“Then it must be a problem with your service provider,” was the response, “We deal with sending mail, they deal with receiving. Can you send mail?”
“No.”
“Can you receive mail?”
“No.”
“Then it’s definitely on their side.”
“But my phone sends a request to my service provider with my name and password, so that I can then receive mail, and that’s when it fails.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll have to put you through to our Data centre. Next time you have a data query please call 155.”
“Thank you,” said Dan, wishing the idiot would’ve done it sooner.

“Do you get what you waaaaant?
Do you know what it iiiiisssss?
Dooo yooouuu caaaaaarrre?”

So Dan waited, and waited. 20 minutes later he hung up, only because he was on his way into a meeting.

The following day Dan called 155. Pressed ’0′ for an operator, and waited a whopping 1 hour and 15 minutes (on speaker phone on the desk) before eventually giving up and hanging up. Now, Dan was livid.

The following day Dan phoned 111, spoke to a lady and demanded that she not put him through to 155, telling her about his extra long on-hold wait, but that she get a Data centre operator to call him to sort out his problem. Two weeks later, to the day, and Dan is still waiting for his fucking phone call.

“Vodacom Customer Care sucks balls!” – A quote directly from Dan’s very angry mouth.

Well, not quite, but two birds with one, um, golf ball?

A short while ago I posted about my brother’s band, Q, well now they’re in a competition on Stuff Magazine‘s website for Stuff Pod Idol 2006.
If you have 5 seconds to spare, please go vote for them on the site, they rock, and I’m not just saying that because he’s flesh and blood.
Ta.
Update: You can get the podcast here (30 June), or just download the mp3, the intro to their track is at 11:30.

Still on the 702 thing, this morning John Robbie was shocked to hear that many Zulu people believe that the owl is a symbol of witchcraft, one caller said, “If I see an owl in my garden, I wont sleep.” Another said “If I see one I’d kill it.”
Seems silly, but harmless (unless of course you’re an owl).

Last week’s cultural learning was a lot scarier, this was the story of people believing that sex with (very) young girls cures AIDS (it’s not just South Africans that believe this too).

“Madness.” said Robbie, and yeah, he’s right, but people believe crazier things everyday.

I heard about this one religious group that believe that you should blow yourself and others up in god’s name, over a piece of land of all things. I mean really.

Then there was this other religious group, I had to laugh, they said that if you didn’t get baptized in their god’s name, what they call getting “born again”, he’d be so upset with you that he would burn your soul for eternity. Hahaha, what a nutter! What’s crazier is that this group still love this okie polokie despite his vindictive ego problem.

My point is that it’s easy to look at the beliefs of others and judge them, things may well seem crazy to us, but if you’re brought up to believe something, logic rarely comes into play…and that’s really, really scary.

Lets face it, if logic truly prevailed, there would be no religion at all.

Reclaim yourself, question everything…!

So here’s the story, you’re a cop, you’re on duty and you get killed. The government recognize the (ultimate) sacrifice you’ve made by giving your family a R200k pay out.
Of which R170k is taxable.

I shit you not.

In this country heroes get taxed to die.

John Robbie from 702 is trying to get the law changed to stop this insanity. Basically he wants this lump-sum payout to be tax free – it’s a no-brainer to me. He’s got a petition going, you can sign it here (don’t forget to check the wee box thingy).

The government giveth…!

A silly woman in Fredericksburg left her pet cockatoo in the car while she went and watched a movie.

It was hot.

Now it’s dead.

Silly.

So a week ago while in Cape Town, Sam introduced me to the joys of Fluff, think a jar full of “fuck me this is good” and you wouldn’t be far wrong. Basically it’s spreadable marshmallow…dude, that’s marshmallow…and you can spread it, dig?

As far as I know you can only buy this from Sweets from Heaven, but man alive it’s worth the effort. On the jar they recommend the fluffernutter; a sandwich (or toast – my way) with peanut butter and fluff, it’s the business, breakfast of champions. Also, between two Maries with a blob of Nutella rocks too.

Oh, and it’s usage aint limited to the kitchen…!

A Grade 8 pupil in Pretoria has been suspended after being deemed ‘too dangerous for school‘.

He stabbed another kid with a pair of scissors, plus he has a bad violence track record. What happened to “I’ll meet you at the bicycle shed after school” and then a good old fashioned bout of fisticuffs occurs?

Apparently stabbing schoolkids with scissors isn’t that uncommon.

You’d think that by the last two posts Jo’blog was turning porno, eh? We spotted this beaut while driving through Northriding yesterday. Koki pen vandalism on a bottle store’s windows.

So cool that today (which is incidentally Rock Star day at the office), Melissa, one of our presentation designers sent me a naked pic.

Yeah, we have the hottest staff too…!

Tell me that an Avbob lady lost her job after bringing a corpse to a party, then halfway through the article let me know that it was a mannequin.

If you’re a Thai cuisine fan, and you live in Gauteng, you’ve undoubtedly dined at one of the four Kai Thai Restaurants. There’re in Olivedale, Monte Casino, Edenvale, and the most recent is in Fountainebleau. But this one isn’t just another restaurant, it’s a whole little village.

They’re still in the process of finishing it all up, but when it’s done the village will consist of a restaurant, spa, karaoke bar and mongolian braai area as well. In operation currently are the restaurant and spa, and we wanted to try them both! Dinner, as always, was superb. But the highlight of the evening was the traditional Thai massage right next door.

We walked in and were greeted with a sherry, and asked to take our shoes off and replace them with wicker sandals provided. We were then escorted to a curtained booth with two mattresses and told to dress in the pyjama’s folded neatly at the foot of the mattress. We changed, we lay down, and between the ladies’ arrival to their departure I had every possible part of my body clicked back into place. The two ladies were laughing as to how much one person could actually click. My back, my neck, every finger, every toe, and when I tapped the pillow gently when a certain click was painful I got a very unapproving “Nooo…” from my I-have-the-strongest-hands-in-the-world Thai friend.

I won’t go into every little detail, because I want you to try it out for yourself. They have a wide range of different treatments, and are open until 10pm every day. Our massage was only half an hour, but after that I felt like I could run a marathon. Can’t wait ’til next time, and believe me, there’s definitely going to be a next time.

Thanks to Rich…! who told me about it a few weeks ago, he went for a different treatment however, I’m sure you’d love to hear about it!

I (lazily) searched for links to Kai Thai, but unfortunately came up short, I can, however, give you the details for the Village.

Address: c/o Hans Strydom and Rabie Str, Fountainebleau
Tel. Restaurant: 011 793 4796
Tel. Spa: 011 793 4879

Enjoy!

A message to all the people who, from today, got on the road and traveled in my time:

For the past two weeks or so, or for however long that blissful school holiday lasted, I’ve been able to get to where I need to be in under half an hour. Today, I spent an hour and a half in the worst traffic ever.

A suggestion to help us all: Make them walk. Or buy them a bicycle. They’ll appreciate it when they’re older. Really.

So I just got mailed this from a person that works for a Discovery competitor asking if I thought it was blog-worthy.

Here’s the ad in question:

Personally, I do think it’s worth blogging about, but only because I find it quite a petty attempt to attack a competitor without any real substance, kinda like Audi’s (possibly faked) not-at-all-snappy-yet-pretty-crappy retort. Me, I see nothing wrong with the ad at all. They’re not advertising smokes, and brand diversification is becoming more and more common.

Shit, just ask Branson…!

write it on the back of your hand, but however you do it, you’re gonna have a few new names to remember when giving directions in the near future.

Name changes galore in our country, names like OR Tambo, just plain KwaZulu or ‘some other appropriate name’, Tshwane (which has been going on for ages), Thabure, Mengkhoaneng, Fothane, Kuretlele, Joalabeholo, Mabolela, Hlohloloane, Tikoe and Tikoane.

I’m lank curious as to how much a huge change like this will cost in ZA Rond!

A biker chick was arrested at a roadblock near Linksfield yesterday for allegedly assaulting a policeman. A number of bikes and cars were impounded for speeding and unroadworthiness too.

Now, I think we all wish biker chicks could look something like the above. My guess? She probably looked something like this:

rowr!

Hoox posted about this website, Crime Expo SA, and I couldn’t agree more.

Have a look, let me know what you think. I think anything that keeps, or tries to keep tourists out of your own country is wrong.

David mailed me this pic he took at the gym. The machine has no seat, and for the stupid people, an ‘OUT OF ORDER’ sign.

Not…!