WHEN the cat is away the mice play.
And they indeed have been playing hard at some weekly papers.
Imagine what I saw this week when I thought I had done a decent job over the past year of whipping mediocre and overweening journalists into line.
My eyes almost popped out of their sockets as if I had caught my partner in flagrante delicto.
It’s either the journos at those papers have been out to spite me or are simply irredeemable — judging by the amount of poop they have been sprinkling all over their pages.
The usual suspect had “April 22 commission a white elephant” as a headline.
For goodness sake, a white elephant is an idiom for a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness or worth.
Hope someone is listening.
Flipping through the pages, they had “solely missed” on another headline.
Sorely. Sorely. Sorely.
But that was kind of child’s play compared to what the newsletter had in store for us.
Believe you me I last saw such scatology in Khotso’s Standard 3 English essays.
Luckily in Khotso’s case I used to find comfort in the fact that he was still young and there was room for improvement.
In any case I never thought I would see such tosh in a national newspaper.
I never thought that bearded men and breasted women could cook worse things.
And cook a stinker they did.
Only heaven knows the curse the English brought to Africa when they taught us their language but left in a rush before we could learn enough of it to avoid embarrassing ourselves.
Dear Lord, what sin have the Informative readers committed that the paper’s editors should punish them with such tosh?
If you think I am raising hell over nothing sit back and enjoy while I bring you excerpts of what the latest edition had to offer — for free!
“The commission which is chaired by Justice Jan Hendrik Steyn will proceed with hearing until the 5th of February while receiving evidence in and out of camera.”
After reading that, my stomach started aching.
“Stock theft is rampant wheather in the country or between Lesotho and South Africa it has caused major heartache as many people lost and continue to lose their lives over stock theft.”
I know this is sickening but I have to tell you that after reading this sentence but“Residents near the town are also the main predicament against the improvement towards the cleanliness of the rank and town as a whole, with Morebotsane indicating that they destroy facilities and take material to use them within their households.”
At this point that food moved up my throat.
I knew if I continued reading this hogwash something terrible was going to happen but still I continued.
“Meanwhile, they are currently waiting for the reopening of Parliament for the approval of their bylaws so that they could enforce them on the environmental perpetrators.”
By this time I was walking towards the loo.
“The food chain in the Vodacom Premier League is getting more brutal than ever before.”
That was the last straw.
I threw up violently.
I fainted.
It took me a full day to fully recover.
Then I tried to read the paper again.
“He said he then sold all of his taxis and still have were tough…”
My doctor tells me before I read that newspaper again I must call an ambulance to be on standby or better still call my burial society to arrange a coffin and transport to QN.
Such copy is life-threatening.
There was a time when my teacher in high school taught me that writing was an art.
My teacher said while everyone can string words together, not everyone can be a writer or a brilliant communicator.
The art of writing is to keep everything simple and straight.
Now, I thought we had all learnt that basic lesson at high school.
Did anyone have a clue what Doggy was up to last week?
True to form he left readers, the majority of whom I believe are of average intelligence just like me, thoroughly confused.
It was a real dog’s dinner.
It would appear Doggy belongs to that school of “confusionists” who believe that in order to impress one must first thoroughly confuse the reader and then seek to convince him or her later.
