pretty persuasion

There's this great line in the musical version of Ninotchka (Silk Stockings) and I'm not sure if the original has it, even though it starred Greta Garbo, and is infinitely better.


Julie Newmar: How can I persuade him if you
can't.

Fred Astaire: Because we are built differently...

And she
smiles wickedly and says aarh.

Sometimes you just have to see things from a slightly different perspective that's all that's required for the pretty mental persuasion to occur.


Julie Newmar stole the show in Silk Stockings, a colourful character who is noted for some tremendously astute observations, as extracted from the the wiki:

Tell me I'm beautiful, it's nothing. Tell me I'm intellectual, I know it. Tell me I'm funny and it's the greatest compliment in the world anyone could give me." — New York Times interview.

"I should have slept with the better producers. I didn’t recognize my worth." - Esquire
Magazine, 2007."

"Ecstasy and beauty are eternal."

"I had three miscarriages, then, at forty-eight, a child with serious
developmental difficulties. He is a blessing and a jewel. He is my teacher. From him I get and
give unconditional love."

"More is not necessarily better. Better is better."

"Shape up, folks. There is no death. Think of it as evolution."

"You can’t fail. The further you fall, the greater the opportunity for growth and change."

knowledge is pleasure

"...I have one thing to add, Just as a holiday, takes a little preparation, so too does day-to-day life outside work. The more you know, the better it is, knowledge is pleasure."

Edward Carr, Intelligent Life, Autumn 2007.

expanding those winter lurv handles

delegation 101

If you have got a dog why bark! This is something I learnt from a good mate in Finance.

And if you understand this bit of logic then as he says, "you've pretty much mastered the nuances of what delegation entails - allowing the dogs the liberty to make some noise every now and again."

seeing the big picture

When John Boorman embarked on the idea of filming Hope and Glory, an auto biographical memoir of his childhood set in London during World War II, he found that he would need to reconstruct the street where he lived.

His reconstruction was done through the glazed eyes of 45 years of memories and with the aid of some research but he did manage to recreate that street on some old air field land strip at the cost of over a quarter of a million pounds.

Upon its completion he enthusiastically and proudly brought some of his family to view it, hoping that their response would be equally as enthusiastic.

But his sister, mother and aunt made the following observations:

The wireless is in the wrong place; you mother always had a vase on the front window sill and it's a pity that you couldn't get the right wallpaper for the lounge.

Six months of work, 1000s of pounds spent, 45 years of recollections but for a few minor missing details.

Well I am having that kind of day, where it doesn't matter how spectacular the potential of the project is, it matters little because I am dealing with people who are only focused on a few insignificant details.

Worst of all they are not family!

so this is how the system works

The Minister of Public Works wanted to remodel her office, so she invited different contractors for tenders.One was from J , one from D and the last one from S "OK gentlemen, I want a nice job ," She said, "Let's hear from J?"

The guy took out his ultrasonic measuring device and laptop and began measuring, scrawling on the computer, calculating.Eventually he said "R90 000, Madam Minister,""That seems like quite a lot of money! Why R90,000?""You see," he replied, "that's R40 000 for material, R40 000 for labour and R10 000 for my profit".

She seemed OK with that and turned to the D contractor. "So how much do you want to do the job?" she asked.The D fella took out a rusted tape measure, broken clipboard and A blunt pencil. He took some measurements, scratched some calculationson the back of his Rothmans box and came up with a figure of R70,000."That's interesting!" said Stella. "Explain the R70 000?""Simple, Madam Minister, I got a brother-in-law in the hardware trade, so that's R35 000 for materials, R30,000 for my guys, and R5,000 for my profit and all."She was amused but happy to accept the explanation.

Then she asked the S contractor for his quotation. He just smiled,looked the minister in the eyes and said, "R270 000!""Yoh Yoh Yoh!.... How did you come to that amount without even taking Your measurements? What is that amount for?""That's R100 000 for me and R100 000 for you!""So what about the remaining R70 000?""We hire that guy from D to do the job!"

somewhere south of the border

The "bump up" is one of the better things that can happen to you when are about to travel, to hear that, "Sir you no longer, in E15, you've been bumped up…"

On Friday I got one of those pleasant one liners as I was about to board for Joburg and even at seven am this person who is generally only socially decent after 11, managed a quick smile of sorts before walking to the plane.

I am always amazed at how Cape Town is perceived by Joburgers, it's the classic East Coast-West Coast, New York-San Francisco scenario playing itself out except that JHB should not be mentioned in the same sentence as New York.

JHB apparently is all zest and zeal, "red and yellow" energy, it's all pace and drive and it gets things done. I admit that Cape Town is a lovely seaside village and nobody here is really trying to complete with the land of Egoli (eagerly) perhaps this week in the 20-20 cricket final but generally we've conceded, we've chosen not to part take in that little rat race.

I guess that when JHB eventually pauses from all of the rah-rah it will discover that it's actually not that exceptional and that it is probably people from the coast (I include Durban) who are propelling it to make those "gigantic industrial" strides at great sacrifice.

Whenever I have worked with people from JHB, I have never thought that they were very exceptional, in fact I often find that it is all hot air, they talk a good game, they imagine that they are movers and shakers and much to their disappointment we kind of ignore them and quietly get on with what needs to be done. Cape Town does have a problem of leaving bundles of "urgent" work in its inbox realising that tomorrow's another day and that procrastination is easy. But as we continue to dance with time, not foolishly trying to beat that clock we do eventually get things done, it’s a dance which has a frustrating rhythm but a rhythm which we have embraced.

On Friday afternoon after a successful workshop which we managed to finish in less than three hours because I wanted to get home, I stood outside the Parktown offices waiting for my transfer, surrounded by electric fencing and anticipating a sluggish commute in the early afternoon traffic I felt vindicated, I felt glad that I wasn't in that race.

And I know that while it's not a popular view but we are miles ahead of 'the game', because at least we are honest in knowing that we are a simple, little, fishing village somewhere down South of the border where we don't have to impress anybody with our feats although we sometimes do manage the odd exceptional thing.

something lush

I'll be far away and grumpy tomorrow, I'll be stuck in a day long workshop, I'll be up at five in the morning so that I can catch that iron bird to JHB but I'll have this lush bit of Francis Albert & Antonio Carlos in my noggen - Baubles, Bangles and Beads.
Bon weekend, takz care be safe.

the blurring has just begun

It's official my virtual friends, now out number my non-virtual friends. Yesterday I got my first hit on my, myspace site, and Soul Basement wanted me as a friend - absolutely - and then I went out to check just who exactly I was befriending and when I got there I wondered how someone who is the suppose know could have missed someone as cool as Soul Basement.

Thanks to the cumbersome, myspace network; I'm now linked into the Soul Basement network. I haven't used it to connect with "real" people yet, perhaps in time when I get that confidence back; I will test the functionality of making chit-chat with my friends.

The nice thing about my virtual self is that my virtual body doesn't give me a hard time like my non-virtual body has been of late, I'm all aches and pains, and then there's that non-virtual work thing that keeps me engaged, although I have been skipping out and into the virtual world every so often.

The blurring has just begun, I look forward to seeing its effects in the next year, as I begin to embrace or reject its possibilities.

My virtual network has the following updates: Air have released a new album, Pocket Symphony, last week, it’s still not in our shops and Blue Six’s new album is out, which I reckon will probably be my album of the year if historical evidence is anything to go by.

'miss golightly i protest'

So the Anti-Crime marches in JHB and Durban weren’t the quite Million Man marches which were predicted and in some circles expected. Approximately 50 concerned activists in each city vibrantly protested on our behalf for a safer living environment. Shout outz, Bigupz and kudos to you but to the organisers I suggest the following:

1.Acknowledge that it’s kinda hard to mobilise the tax paying middle class, they like to protest in boutiques.
2.You have got to glam it up, I would have gotten a few corporate sponsors; hampers which included a tres kool, yellow and red, protest t-shirt and there would have been a Platinum Card VIP area with access to special toilets – basically I would have made a few people pay for the privilege of mass protesting.
3.Finally, these marches needed to be in the middle of a working week, nothing like patriotically skipping a few hours of work for the cause.

Anyway, despite the poor turn-out, crime is a real problem and I think that it is on the political agenda. This in itself isn’t enough and we need to sensibly exert our influence in order to make this place much-much safer, I wouldn’t purport to know how we do this exactly but it should be via as many channels and forums as possible.

That’s the point really, back in the day, good ol’ protest marches were one of the better ways to exert influence and mobilise sentiment but today as a result of all of this struggle, many more platforms have been opened up for dissent, Radio; Television; The Internet; Financial Institutions placing adverts in the Sunday Papers blah de blah green tea.

This puts the subject into the public discourse, it puts it on agendas, it gets people focused and begins to build models which can be replicated to solve this multi-faceted problem. Things happen at grassroots, things happen at a macro-level and in between we complain about it not happening fast enough – “Where is all of this money that I’m paying to prevent anarchy going?”

I said before that we don’t know what we don’t know and that that is one of the major problems that we face, we don’t know what it really feels like to be safe in our own environment hence it’s very difficult to fight aggressively for that end state of which we have been robbed.

I wasn’t there, I did however wear these cool t-shirts this weekend, sometimes there is as much of a message in the accessories as there is in the means.