FOMOing at the Mouth

In accordance with the Knockandian philosophy of “No occasion is too mundane if beer is involved”, Knockando held an annual event known as the Knock Olympics.  A two-day event, the Olympics was divided into the Indoor Events (Basketball, squash, pool, darts, drinking competitions) which ran on a Friday afternoon in August, and the Outdoor Events (Soccer, rugby, tennis, road running, tug-o-war) which would occur the next day.  The res was split into 5 teams –Teams were based on where you stayed in the building, e.g. Residents of the top floor of the residence’s Williams Hall were team “4 th Floor” – and competition was quite fierce. During the 2000 Knock Olympics, competition was extremely fierce.  4 th Floor was engaged in a bitter struggle for top of the heap with their hated rivals C & D Units, and the difference between winner and second place was literally coming down to the single digits.  As such, extreme importance was placed on events where number...

One of the great stereotypes that I happen to conform to is that of “Former resident of a University house who keeps harkening back to the crazy shit he and his res buddies did”.  However, this is a badge that I wear with pride, as the four years I spent as a resident in what could perhaps be called Johannesburg’s rowdiest residence were amongst the most enjoyable of my life. I was a resident in Knockando Men’s Residence for 4 years, from 1998 to 2001, back during the tail end of what many regard as the house’s heyday.  At the time, Knock (As it was affectionately known) was a Johannesburg College of Education res that the University of the Witwatersrand, Rand Afrikaans University and Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) occasionally sent residents to, before subsequently being absorbed by Wits when JCE was subsumed into the University of Johannesburg.  Knock had long had a reputation for rowdiness – One of the fairly well-known sayings around JCE and Wits campuses at th...

Let me tell you the story of how I came to fall in love with the pageant, pomp and circumstance that is professional wrestling. A preliminary note right here:  I call it professional wrestling because that’s what the art form has been known as for decades.  If you call it “Sports Entertainment”, kindly get right TF off my blog right away and go put the finishing touches on your dog’s hairstyle or whatever it is that weirdos like you do in your spare time.  “Sports Entertainment” is what happens when a basketball player accidentally punches a referee in the balls , or when Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer start beating each other up even though they play for the same team .  Professional wrestling is what I’m talking about here. Now that the finer points are out of the way, let’s step back in time a bit, to when wrestling first wormed its way into my heart: I want to take you back to 1987, the year when Captain Picard and his crew set out on their first advent...

I won’t deny that marriage is hard. Anyone who is currently or has previously been married can attest to the fact that this most sacred of bonds between two people can be difficult to sustain on the day-to-day.   You have to make room in your life for another person’s moods, opinions and dreams, and when you don’t see eye to eye, it’s not like you can snap your fingers and make them vanish.  (Well, unless you’re King Henry VIII )  But:  If you’ve married the right person, there will be more days when it clicks than when it doesn’t.  And when it clicks, it really clicks.  I courted my wife for 5 years before I proposed, and it was another 18 months before we tied the knot.  But because we were both 100% sure of our union, we have been fantastically happy from Day One, except when we fight over which is the True Trilogy, Star Wars or The Lord of The Rings .  To steal a line from the biography of Mötley Crüe , of all places:...

LAST WEEK ON FOMOING AT THE MOUTH :  Rodney introduced us to a new way of thinking around how movies are constructed.  Also, there were explosions and car chases and boobies and you should really read last week’s introduction to this week's entry by clicking here   if you haven’t already read it.  (DISCLAIMER:  Explosions, car chases and boobies may only have occurred in the author’s mind) The following are movies that I have found memorable almost entirely for the “single” scene/s, that is, the snippet that stands out and makes the rest of the film seem much more memorable simply by having been included.  I’m not saying these movies are bad – Certainly, some of them lack a certain amount of merit, but others would have been just as good without the scene – but I just think that if one were to cut the “single” scene out, one may not actually enjoy it as much as one did.  We’ll start off slowly and build our way up:  

YouTube is a fantastic site.  Not only is it more addictive than bacon salt , but you are secure in the knowledge that there is some other lunatic who is just as obsessed with terrible movies like   From Justin To Kelly as you are.   I remember once showing my then 62-year-old technologically illiterate mother how to find a Susan Boyle video on the venerable ‘Tube.  I did so with almost guilty trepidation, as I knew the discovery that having basically every video clip you can think of on tap will change your life, and not necessarily in a good way. The other wonderful thing about YouTube is that it has taught us a fundamental truth about modern movies and mankind in general:  Nobody cares about whole movies anymore.  Usually, people these days are fascinated with a movie because of one or two key scenes that crop up in and amongst a whole bunch of filler.  Effectively, in this quick-fix age of breakfast sandwiches and fast-acting pai...

Now that the Christian holiday of Easter is past, it caused me to reflect on what this time of year is all about:  Eating.  In line with this, I present to you a video, a video which made me unimaginably happy as it combined two of my favourite things:  Food, and introducing people to new food.  It has been doing the rounds on The Interwebs for a little while, but if you haven’t seen it, please check it out below: A few notes on this clip before I continue: I did not know Rock Shandy was a South African thing.  I would have chosen something far more representative, like witblits  or a Springbokkie .  (Though, I s’pose we don’t want BuzzFeed contributors slamming down two witblitses then getting into a fistfight about rugby, now do we?) Why they gotta disrespect Anchovette like that?  This was a breakfast staple in my house for years, and if it tastes like penguin food, then it’s the penguin food that only rich penguins who drive au...

A few days ago, I found myself in an interesting position in the concluding phase of a job interview. Since I don’t work in Hollywood, the interesting position was not the Missionary position (Ba-dum-bum!!) but one of a more conceptual nature:  I had applied for an internal transfer to a different division in the company I currently work for, and we had reached the final stages of the negotiation process, which involved fighting over money. Now, even though I’m Lebanese, I hate fighting over money, which is probably the reason that I will go down in history as the only poor Lebanese person in South Africa.  But, my wife and I have big plans for the next few months, so I at least need to put up some form of resistance.  When I was informed by the admittedly sympathetic HR lady (Heretofore abbreviated as ASHL) that the move would be a lateral one in terms of salary – A fancy corporate way of saying:  “We’re not giving you any more money” – I was a bit ann...

Once again, I interrupt my own train of thought for a worthy cause. This time, it is to plug my own post at my wife's blog.  Kindly refer yourself here and enjoy my recounting of the experience of sharing a room with my son.  Note that this is the first time I have shared a room with a toddler since I was a toddler, and so the experience proved both more challenging and more rewarding than I could have imagined. There is also an awesome shirtless beefcake picture of me, if you're interested.  (You know you are...) Have a gander, and check out the rest of my wife's kickass blog while you are there.

Last week's post was set up to be the first in the series.  I know this because I was there when I wrote it.  However, in the meantime, a colleague and friend, Preston Wheatley, issued an invitation for me to write for his excellent car buyer's blog, which you can find here .  Being the massively insecure former fat kid (And currently fat adult) that I am, I didn't want to start writing for the site until I had formally auditioned.  Below is the piece I wrote for said audition.  I enjoyed it, so I thought I would interrupt my series to present it here.  I hope you enjoy it, too. (Side note:  Preston tried very hard to be positive about the piece, God bless his idealistic soul, but he ultimately had to ask me to "turn it down" with regards to references to certain demographic groups.  I explained that, for this reason, I might not be a good fit for his site, because I don't really know how to turn anything down without becoming so boring...

I often wonder how people decide what is important to them. I mean, I’m not talking about important in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word.  Biology has been thoughtful enough to provide us with a pretty clear set of parameters in this regard.  We need: -           Food to act as fuel for the Meat Machine within which we are all trapped.  This fuel has spawned major industries and several minor celebrities, and I for one am a big fan of it. -           Clothing to act as a means for said Meat Machine to regulate its own temperature over a wider range.  Note that we can survive without clothes, it’s just a lot harder to do so.  (And a lot more embarrassing when shopping for food) -           Sleep to allow the Meat Machine to perform maintenance.  Even South Africa’s less-than-competent electricity parastatal o...

So, Fifty Shades of It’s Not Porn Darling, I Swear hit the market recently.  And, I have to admit, a lot of the pictures and statuses and shares and shit around it have me a little hot under the collar, but not for the conventional reason associated with this movie.  Let me illustrate why I’m irritated with a little story: In 1999, I was still a hopeful, doe-eyed medical student who hadn’t yet realized that his true calling wasn’t elbow-deep in human guts.  During this period I was also a resident at Knockando Men’s Residence, a place which encouraged an active social life, to say the least.  (In retrospect, this may be the reason why I am a former medical student instead of a current doctor…)  At some point during this year, French director Catherine Breillat released a movie entitled Romance X .  (Please note, I am going by what IMDB says here.  I can’t remember the actual chronology, and I am also a person who willingly gives himself over ...

“Just write something…  Anything”, they have told me, again and again. Here’s the problem:  I am so used to writing when the muse descends, that I’m not actually sure how writing regularly would work.  The muse herself is more fickle than a high school girlfriend, feeding me peeled, vanilla-dipped grapes with one hand while slapping my face with the other.  And often, what I thought was champagne when it first came out turns out to be, upon later review, Grade A, Premium Toilet Water. I guess I am, by far, not the first person to suffer through this.  I don’t imagine I’m anything special.  Look, I’d like to think that I’m a little special.  More so than the guy buying bullets off of a TV shopping channel at two in the morning, naked except for his socks and wondering if the chick who answered his phone call is single.  (Well, that guy might be special, too, but more in a kind of “Needs newspaper under the chair at mealtimes” kind of way) ...

So, I’ll confess:  I don’t have a great deal of experience with Valentine’s day.  I was the fat kid who got better marks than everyone else, so you can picture how popular that made me in high school. (Hey, don’t knock it, though:  It forced me to grow a personality so robust that, despite the fact that I’m 20 kilos overweight and collect Star Wars Lego, I still married a woman who looks like this: Now, before the sarcastic comments start: -  Yes, this really is my wife, I didn’t poach a photo off the internet. -  Yes, she has working eyes. -  No, I didn’t have to take her grandmother hostage to get a date with her. -  Yes, we’ve had consensual sex, I have a 22-month-old son to prove it)