Rod MacKenzie's Blog, page 12

Reflections on nearly dying the other day

"We really need you to fart," the cute nurse said sternly as I lay on my hospital bed, feeling the hookah of the morphine drip silently bubbling through me after I pushed a button which punched into me the next tot of that wonderful elixir. I stared at her mournfully, unable to perform the gassy [...]

Assange T-shirts and the US's Newspeak

Man, the world we live in now works in nanoseconds. Up-to-the-minute Julius Assange T-shirts are available for ordering here. He has barely been jailed and T-shirts saying "Free Julius Assange" are already available. (My favourite is still "Julius Assange is my homeboy".) Sure, no doubt the T-shirt was available well in advance in anticipation of [...]

WikiLeaks just a smokescreen

As I wrote this I felt I'd been given a challenging advertising brief: write a campaign that will convince zealous feminists to happily subscribe to pornographic magazines for men and make those women look forward to savouring the contents. In other words, I'm inclined to think most will sneer at this piece. But that's what [...]

New Zealand betrays the human race, SA doesn't

Oh New Zealand … would something please HAPPEN?!? We humans are Happening People, and "happening" stuff collocates with happy. I see from the etymology that "hap" has a common root in both words: "fortuitous circumstances", from which we get other terms like mishap.

The guys in SA just don't know how lucky they are with their [...]

First impressions and SA's culture of mistrust

"Hiya, do you mind just looking after my handbag?" the stranger, a pretty twenty-something woman in a bikini asked us as we lay on the beach in Long Bay, Auckland. "No problem," I replied, looking around to see if there was a camera filming this for some Leon Schuster film. I looked at Marion in [...]

Pssstt…hey sexy! (that's me)

"Wheeet!" they whistled. "Hey sexy!" Two lithe lasses in bikinis were crooning after me. In my slim twenties I got that quite a bit (especially with regard to my buns, or so I was told), then less and less. I've lost fifty kilograms now, most of it in six months, and am getting some [...]

Why can't more men be like me?

I stare at the messy kitchen used by seven people where we live here in Auckland and saw the challenge. Long ago I learned to see domestic work as a form of meditation. It can also be an exercise in gratitude.
As I pick up rubbish and put it into the large garbage bag I think [...]

SA News? Best thriller read on the planet, but…

I love following SA news. The kiwi stuff is lukewarm potty water compared to the fiery mampoer of the SA film scripts that get dished out every week. Yes, they're potential film scripts: from the shenanigans of Julius Seizure to the recent, apparent uncovering of the first democratic election in 1994 being rigged in places [...]

In a world of rape and tweets, what's happened to handwritten love letters?

There's something heartwarming about the thing made over time with tenderness and given to a loved one. Hallmark cards have nothing on a child's personal creation made with bright crayons for his mom. Nor do tweets and SMSes, filled with "mwah" and gratuitous images of flowers. Imagine coming home with a crown of flowers for [...]

Booted out of school for speaking Xhosa?

Sixteen-year-old Luthando Nxasana was allegedly asked to leave a class at Roosevelt High in Johannesburg for speaking Xhosa. This, on the face of it, sounds scandalous and has managed to make news internationally. But it becomes less scandalous when one realises that the class she was attending was given in the medium of another language, English, and [...:]