The Olympic Spirits

I am kind of pleased the Olympics are now over. The pressure to watch serious, but very boring sports over entertaining, but very silly sports becomes a bit much after a fortnight. I mean, the events range from watching paint dry (target shooting) to circus events (rhythmic gymnastics), with some recognisable athletic effort somewhere in between (the marathon). I keep wondering what the organiser of the ancient Olympic games would have thought of what goes on 2797 (2021 + 776BC) years after the first event. Once he got over the shock of the presence of women at the games, he would have been baffled by the amount of lycra, as the ancient games were supposedly performed naked. I think of this whenever I hear anything about the Norwegian women’s beach handball team protesting the requirement that they wear bikini’s instead of more practical and modest shorts. I wonder if the organisers are trying to return to a more traditional Olympics by slowly reducing the amount of clothing worn by athletes until we once again achieve full nudity. Although women athletes have been wearing panties and a bra on the track for several years now, I was quite alarmed at how little, if any, underwear the men wear under their running gear. The lack of support provided by ultra breathable lycra is well, quite 776BC.

Pierre de Courbetin, the originator of the modern Olympic Games would be more scandalised. He would be deeply shocked by the swimsuits worn by the female divers and the synchronised swimmers, basically g-strings, they are not designed to withstand the ripping forces of a triple backward somersault. The gymnasts, who spend half their routines with one foot behind an ear, get modest and substantial leotards to wear, but the synchronised swimmers who spend most of the time upside down with their legs spread skywards, sport an alarming lack of coverage. All the sequins in the world don’t make up for the fact that the free routine in artistic swimming is basically pornography.

This is an immense pity because synchronised swimming, or artistic swimming as it is now known, is one of, if not the most difficult sports at the Olympics. How you can compare 4 minutes of holding your breath while thrashing about underwater with archery, a sport performed from a position of the utmost stillness? Although it would be a small leap for our ancient Olympian to accept to the modern bow, one could even explain that bicycles are a modern form of horse free chariot, artistic swimming would be completely incomprehensible to him. We would have to explain that it was the water nymphs or river goddesses entertaining the crowds, rather than an actual sport. I think he would understand. The rest of the female athletes would be seen as competitors from Amazonia and would be treated with the fearful amount of respect afforded to women warriors. We would have a harder time explaining golf to our ancient Olympian than 13 year old girls on skateboards

To avoid this difficult conversation, I have developed a ranking system for Olympic sports. Each sport gets a number of points based on the criteria explained below. Any sport scoring less than three is out. As you can imagine, golf doesn’t make the cut.

• If the sport requires speed, strength or height, give 3 points immediately for fulfilling Olympic requirements.

• Give ONE extra point for each of the following:

• Takes place in water – extra point for the risk of drowning
• Requires a ball – this covers the traditional sports
• Requires basic equipment – like a tennis raquet or a hockey stick
• 2 Points for complex apparatus – like a bicycle, a sailing boat or a horse
• Requires fixed apparatus – like parallel bars, a beam or hurdles
• Requires team co-ordination – like getting a ball into a goal
• Requires team synchronisation – where points are given for the whole team doing identical things like rhythmic gymnastics or synchronised diving
• Requires choreography – any “routine” that has to be memorised
• Requires music – a whole new dimension is added
• Requires superhuman flexibility or agility – starting with the pike position and ending in the triple backwards somersault
• Requires any kind of “aiming” – this is a nod to the ancient Olympics which included archery and actually hitting something with your javelin
• Is a re-creation of some form of fighting or combat – the ancient Olympics were actually war games, so fencing and wrestling qualify.
• Is horribly dangerous – the risk of smashing your face on concrete earns you a danger point. (Skateboarding)
• Requires endurance – should be an Olympic requirement as in higher, faster, stronger, for longer.

Then, any sport that requires sparkly costumes, make up, glitter or a fancy hairstyle, gets a bonus point. That’s why you see the bog ordinary track athletes sporting pink hair and glittery nails – they are trying to up their glamour score.

So golf, would score 2. It has a ball and a basic piece of equipment, a club. It doesn’t qualify.

Water Polo scores a 3, it takes place in water, with a ball and is a team sport. I reluctantly let this one in.

The cycling road event scores a 6: 2 points for complex apparatus, 3 points for speed and 1 for endurance.

Rhythmic gymnastics scores a 6: Points for basic apparatus, flexibility, synchronisation, music and choreography and a bonus point for glamour.

Rowing would score the highest – it’s a water sport (1), with complex apparatus (2) requires speed (3) and endurance (1) and is a team sport (1). That’s an 8 overall.

So handball is out, it only scores 2. So is shooting, although it scores three, for aiming(1) and complex apparatus (2), a point is deducted for requiring the lowest heartrate of all activities, other than sleeping. It doesn’t count as combat as the person being shot isn’t a factor. If they upgraded it to paintball, duelling or some sort of gunfight, then it would score an additional point for combat and everyone’s heartrates would soar.

So, back to the synchronised swimming. With a score of 6, it qualifies as superhuman, which is why only river goddesses and water sprites can do it. It is therefore an exhibition sport staged purely to please the gods which means they will smile on future Olympic games, provided we keep the golfers and handball players out of site in the bunkers.

On losing one’s sense of smell….

So, to be honest, I can’t smell anything from May to August each year anyway. I suspect that no-one in Johannesburg can either. The dryness, the dust, the smoke and the inversion layer keeping pollution at face level, all conspire to create a perfect storm of nasal snottiness and stuffiness that rule out any sense of smell, even with addiction levels of decongestant nasal spray and antihistamines in play. So when my first cup of coffee of the day tasted watery and disappointing, no alarm bells went off, in fact I blamed the blend, the grind and the extraction of the coffee machine for the poor level of taste sensation. Then later at work, I ordered a cappucino from the canteen, in order to boost the day’s overall coffee experience and came to the enlightening conclusion that I should stop wasting R23 a shot on subgrade university canteen coffee. I had few expectations of the toasted sandwich I ordered later on in the day, as no-one expects a toasted sandwich from a univerisy canteen to be a gourmet taste explosion anyway, especially one that comes from a kitchen that makes such poor coffee.

It was only when I got home and washed my hands, as one should, that I realised that the fancy vanilla and verbena handwash that I keep in the kitchen was not delivering on it’s brand promise, that of an intense and uplifting fragrance offering. There is nothing intense or uplifting about nothing at all. Maybe if one of the first symptoms of Covid was a sudden loss of sight, we could have nipped the whole thing in the bud. Losing your sense of smell is a dangerous warning signal because unless you are a dog or a sommelier, you are unlikely to notice immediately.

So now I am a third wave statistic, so is my husband and one of my daughters. The other daughter was weirdly negative, even though she has been sharing a house and car with all of us and is the more affectionate of the two girls. She retired to her room and self isolated from the already quarantined household in a sort of double lockdown for ten days, although it was sometimes hard to notice as this is what teenagers do anyway and staying in your room and never coming out is the dream scenario for an introvert. The diagnosis shut down the younger daughter’s grade and the entire school orchestra. (The trumpet and clarinet are considered superspreading instruments.) We are now THAT family – instead of just being quiet about our infection and minimising inconvenience for all, we indulged in attention seeking confessions and ruined it for everyone.

My students went into panic mode and refused to come to campus, which is irritating because where do they think I got this from? The supermarket where everyone wears masks, sanitises on entry and social distances with their trolleys, or campus where masks are half mast to expel vape vapour and everyone hugs each other EVERY DAY in greeting, as if it has been forever, instead a couple of hours ago, that they saw each other at that bar in Parkhurst called the Jolly Spreader, where the music is so loud you have no choice but to yell into each other’s faces a hand’s breath away in order to be heard.

I actually burst into tears when the nurse gave me my results of my rapid antigen test, but she reassuringly told me that I would be doing the right thing by gravely inconveniencing everybody I had breathed on in the past week and possibly shutting down two educational and one financial institution, an orchestra, a karate dojo and a hairdresser. The family GP wasn’t so sympathetic, he sneered at the rapid antigen test and shoved a toilet brush into my frontal lobe instead. (The nurse who took my first test gently tickled the back of my throat with a feather.) He then quarantined us and wrote out a radioactive prescription for my husband. When my husband complained about the severity of the medication he was told, “this is the medication that you will be taking, your only choice will be to take it now in the comfort of your own home or later in the ICU.”

My two weeks of quarantine were two of the busiest but loneliest of my life. My husband retired to bed with his cortisone and slept a lot, and when he was awake he was not well enough to concentrate on the TV so he watched intolerable YouTube rubbish instead which kept me out of the room. The girls were now doing online school, so they were locked away in class for most of the day, after which they sulked and fumed in glorious isolation. Both were furious at us for getting sick and doing this TO them, as if they were grounded instead of quarantined. The maid was avoiding us, lurking in the kitchen wearing two masks and spraying Jik at everything, so I was stuck in my study with the marking, online shopping and the triple load of lecture preparation that goes with teaching remotely. Without my scintillating personality to keep them interested in the classroom, students require twice the amount of slides, pictures, videos, worksheets, cribsheets, encouragement and bullying to keep them going. My only gratifying interaction was with the GP who wanted us to Whatsapp him our SATS and heart rates twice a day, so twice a day I got a thumbs up because my SATS stayed above 96%. He sent us a big bill for this caring service.

Now the sweats and chills and coughing are over and we are left with the myocarditis and asthma as a reminder that we are now in the “recovery” section of the statistics. We have now got used to not leaving the house, and in my daughter’s case, not leaving her bedroom. In fact we no longer want to go out. It’s like Stockholm syndrome, we’ve stopped fighting lockdown and sort of, kind of, like it now.

This is my author’s website, OK!

I’m trying to get a book published but after a long and heartbreaking submission process I have discovered that reading your manuscript is the absolutely LAST thing that publishers do. The first thing they do is click through to your “Author’s Website”. Catch 22 is any publisher’s favourite work, on a literary and conceptual level. You need a website to get published, but you need to be published in order to call yourself an author, you can’t have an author’s website until you are published, but you can’t get published without one. So, this is me, resurrecting my ancient blog and calling it an “Author’s Website”, while I try to figure out what sort of website an unpublished, once off, young adult novel, should have. (Ideas in the comment section please – unless you are a publisher, then just read the OTHER attachment that you got in the e-mail, which was the actual manuscript.).

Unfortunately, the only worthwhile thing I have to blog about nowadays are the amazing assignment bloopers that I come across almost daily, but laughing at your students in public is strongly discouraged on account of their glass-like psychological states. In fact, it would get me fired. I have just completed my POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act) training and I’m pretty sure that publishing the exact extent of a student’s illiteracy violates all sorts of Gen Z rights. I am told that University is supposed to be a “safe space” and the fact that your lecturer thinks that your psychological state should at least include some toughened safety glass (I lecture building construction, among other things), is considered seditious. I’m not sure who told the snowflakes that University was a “Safe Space”, but that person deserves to be encased in concrete, like a sewer pipe passing underneath a floor slab.

In addition to a website, publishers expect you to have many, many social media followers on every possible social media platform. In my life, it’s mainly my students who have an active social media presence, which is why it is a really bad idea for me to have one. In fact it is discouraged by the University. Students would rather you communicated with them on Twitter than on the official university e-mail system because then they have a reportable and shareable record of every sarcastic comment you make and every conflicting instruction you give. Each one of which can be produced out of context in a disciplinary hearing. I am pretty sure that I could light up Twitter like the Sydney Harbour Bridge on New Year’s Eve, which is one excellent reason for me to stay off it. I would have to spend a lot of time appeasing, apologising and explaining to the sanctimonious and humourless that I was being facetious, and not ironic or sarcastic. The main thing I have learnt about social media from the Multimedia Marketing class is that you should use your Twitter hand to wave blandly at the crowds while keeping your mouth firmly shut.

And no, I don’t want to be an ” influencer” either. I’m sure some of them are very nice people but I have marked, and failed, too many Honours papers exploring whether influencers have “a positive effect on brand equity” or if “celebrity influencers can raise brand awareness”. The answer is no they don’t and they can’t. The other answer, which will get you a 35% grade max, is that in order to be a successful influencer you have to be “genuine”. I am very suspicious of being genuine, that has led to a lot of misunderstanding in the past. I think I’m being “insightful” but others think I am simply acerbic. I had to look up what acerbic meant, apparently I have lot in common with ascorbic acid, which is unpleasantly sharp, but very good for you. Kind of sums up my lecturing style nicely.

I’m also getting increasingly hazy about what the publisher is actually going to do. After submitting your marketing plan to them, something most writers imagine they need a publisher for, they want to know if your book has been read by a professional reader (not them) to check for engaging plot techniques and narrative arcs. Then they want to know if it has been professionally editted before they assign an editor to you. Then they give you pages of formatting instructions, different for each publishing house, so each time you send it out you have to change the font and spacing. One publisher even lists the punctuation rules to which they expect you to adhere – it runs to about 20 “Crimes of the Comma” that will immediately disqualify you from consideration. It includes a little rant about how semi colons have no place in fiction. I didn’t understand most of the rules, I’ve only just grasped the resurgance of the Oxford comma; it wasn’t in vogue when I was at school. If my students use an occassional full stop, I am over the moon. They don’t even have to follow the full stop with a capital letter for me to be super impressed. Paragraphs are reserved for the Masters students, pressing the return key occasionally is not considered suitable for undergraduates. (See Bloomberg’s taxonomy – Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluate, Create, Punctuate.)

Then the publishers want a pitch and a synopsis, both basically spoilers for the carefully built sense of intrigue and clever plot twist and that occur too far into the book for the casual reader. At most, they want the first three chapters in which absolutely nothing happens other than setting the scene and introducing your protagonists. It is only in a Lee Child novel that four people get beaten up and a nuclear warhead goes missing before page 7, but unless your novel reads like the first five minutes of a Mission Impossible movie, it gets discarded before your thoughtful and sensitive hero can get his act together. My hero’s mother dies from cancer in the first chapter, but I’m thinking about murdering her instead, just to speed up the action a bit.

Chicken Run

Portrait of our Rooster

Now that I am overqualified and underemployed, I decided I needed a hobby to take me through the mornings. My obsession with Game of Thrones doesn’t count as it is unhealthy, so we decided to get some chickens. I wanted them for eggs but my husband delusionally thought we were getting them for meat. Then the children gave them names which put paid to that fantasy. (Come to think of it, why does anyone in Game of Thrones have names? Careless and ignorant as I am on poultry raising I have still lost fewer chickens than the average headcount per episode of Series 3.)

Game of Thrones IV – I can hardly wait!

Now that I am gainfully unemployed I am filling my time, as I promised myself I would when I was in the thick of the MBA, by getting obsessively involved in a television series. It seemed like the kind of thing that people with leisure time on their hands would do. My hypothesis has been proved correct. My addiction of choice is Game of Thrones, and series 4 starts on Friday and I can hardly wait.

My daughter calls it “ Harry Potter for adults”, she walked in on me watching it one day, and caught a scene with the dragons. Harry Potter also has dragons, swords and magic, but not as much sex and graphic violence. If my children are home when I am watching it I have to keep one finger on the pause button in case they wander in, because at any given moment someone might either be getting their throat slit (the preferred method of character termination) or be slipping out of their pants or dress (none of the characters in the series appear to wear any underwear). But unlike Harry Potter where the lines between good and evil are age appropriately drawn in black and white, the boundaries here are deliciously blurred.

Vitamin B Dog

Some misguided people believe that the internet was created so that academic institutions could share their research and build on the universal body of knowledge by publishing it in an internationally accessible forum. Others believe the internet was invented as a mutual pet appreciation platform. Obviously the latter is correct because there is an abundance of unsubstantiated, nonacademic and unreferenced rubbish on the web but few blogs entitled, “I hate my cat.” This is why I have avoided blogging about my dogs. They are a cause of great stress in my life, but I realize that if I admit this, my blog readership will fall into the negative and people I don’t really know will unfriend me on facebook.

Mythbusting the MBA

So the year of the dragon has come and gone and is defined by my failure to post anything at all on my blog site. My husband pointed this out in about September, which I found a little odd since he is one of the people who actually knows what I have been doing this year, and since he is the one who is paying for me to be a student again, one would think that he would be glad that I was not spending my precious study time blogging.

Stress Relief #2. Nitpicking

OK, maybe I’m getting a little anxious about the impending thesis, but this kind of thing really irritates me. Yes, I did really send this off. Not waiting breathlessly for the response.See the actual flyer at the end of the post.

Dear Tsunami in Morningside

I was at your restaurant for lunch on Sunday the 3^rd February with my 2 daughters.  We spent the meal entertaining ourselves with finding new and hilarious spelling errors on your Valentine’s Special flyer.

Value for Effort Recipe 8 – Satin Icing

I’ve never been a fan of butter cream icing. It isn’t the miracle decorating medium it is made out to be – it is difficult to spread, is either too stiff or too sloppy, collects crumbs and breaks your hands when trying to pipe it. It also needs heavy machinery to make, especially since I consider sifting icing sugar to be the number one most tedious kitchen chore. I just toss the butter and sugar into the Kenwood cake mixer and turn it on high for a very long time.  No lumps survive force 10 pulverisation.

I have tried other icings, Royal icing is nice for biscuits, doesn’t work for three dimensional Barbie cakes. I have tried Italian Meringue, aka 7 minute icing, although it didn’t take 7 minutes to make (it was more like 12 anxious minutes watching beating egg white and boiling sugar syrup trying to make friends in my cake mixer) and my children hated it, which disqualifies it for the Value for Effort certification. It also covers your kitchen in a fine, but irritating, layer of stickiness. I have finally found an icing that works for me. I like to call it satin icing because the texture is smoother and creamier than buttercream, it is easier to work with, stays glossy and luxurious and is just generally much nicer.

Value for Effort Recipe 7 – Miracle Pasta

Maybe I am guilty of a bit of hyperbole here, but if I had headed my post “Spaghetti with Marmite” you would have gone “Yuck” and moved on. I saw Nigella Lawson making this the other day on TV. At the time I thought it was well below her usual standard, but even if I wouldn’t trust Nigella with my life, (she traded in her first husband while he was still on his deathbed), I would definitely trust her with my lunch. This hardly even qualifies as “Value  for Effort”, the effort is negligible, but since my children’s eating habits are inversely proportional to the amount of effort I put into their meals, this is a real winner.