Rubik's Cube nightmare.

Did you ever have that one THING that everyone could do at school, only you could never seem to come to grips with? Maybe you had difficulties flicking your marbles in the hole during break. Or maybe you couldn't walk the dog (or any other animal for that matter) with your Yo-Yo.

My THING however was the infamous Rubik's Cube. It is inconceivable to me now that as a mere eight year old, my social standing in school was defined by whether I could line up all the colors nice and cube like.

Luckily for me, the craze did pass, and the next big THING turned out to be silkworm farming. (To be honest I wasn't much better at that, but I did find that if you arranged your silkworms in a certain way on the leaves, no one could tell that they were in the final stages of decomposing )

The only reason I have been able to live with my cubing baggage from childhood, is because somewhere in the back of my mind, it seemed impossible to imagine that this hobby would surface ever again. With the popularity of PC Games and consoles in South Africa, I never imagined that anyone would want to reinvent this square hobby.

I was wrong.

Walking by the toy section of the supermarket today, my worst nightmare came true! There on a shelf, looking all innocent, sat the Rubik's army.

The old cubes didn't come alone this time. They had brought reinforcements: spheres, pyramids, and even 16 sided mutations that should have never seen the light of day, all waiting for new young victims to enslave.

My prayers are with every young person out there tonight that are not net enabled, and cannot download the solution to this puzzle nightmare.

By the way...I still have my rubics cube. It is lock away in the attic. In a lead chest. With a huge freaking lock on it!

Rural Mellow Country Crooning

After spending two not-so-glorious days in the tiny Mpumalanga burgh of Kriel last week, I've decided that small towns seem to have an unexplainable need to express the sorrows of their rural lives in the form of cheap, reproduced country music.

From 7am to 7pm Kriel Info Radio, the local community radio station, played non-stop country hits. And I mean non-stop. Most of which were not even by the original artists, but by some lowly South African troubadours who failed to get placed in the top 1000 during the last Idols competition.

Does this insipidly mellow crooning really relieve the agony of daily rural living, people? I doubt it! After one hour I was ready to slice my own wrists with the nearest butcher knife! How can a song about some cowboy that was "born beside a cornfield" inspire anything else but the urge to drown ones sorrows in a dirty glass of cheap alcohol?

I'm not surprised to hear the locals muse about the lack of economic growth in their town. I'm sure the awful music is scaring off any potential investors. Who wants to put their money in a town where the most popular radio station plays hick rubbish from dawn to dusk.

I hate to break the next two painful truths to you people, but a) you're not living the southern American dream so stop pretending you are, and b) cheap country music was never groovy, hip or funky, and never will be.

Live8: Alive Or Dead

I could not agree more with the points MacDara brought up this week in his post: Learning a Lesson from Live8 .

He has an amazingly accurate understanding about how many Africans view and feel about the concert.

In truth a bunch of well meaning celebrities jumping up and down, pronouncing their support, does little to get aid to where its is really needed in Africa. This is a continent where some (not all) leaders, care more about their own pockets, then the state of their countries economic or social shape. No matter what policies are instituted by the G8, these leaders will not be persuaded to change their ways.

Neither me or MacDara, I believe, are saying that raising awareness about the needs of so many African countries is a futile endeavourer. We just believe that the millions spent on organizing these concerts could have been better spent on providing aid in other forms; like for example teaching starving people how to farm and how to rotate corps properly. Trust me, the proud people of Africa would rather prefer to learn ways to help themselves, then to have to accept aid from others.

This post is not about stopping all aid to Africa, but rather about giving people the chance to take care of their own, before we accept that they can not do so without any aid from the West.

This is about not being patronizing to those that are in need of aid.