Speaker’s corner

IAM SURE everybody’s heard of Densa, the society for those who fail to qualify for Mensa, which is the international society for the highly intelligent. Twenty-five years ago I formed the South African chapter of Densa and I want to recall the “Gala Congress” that I organised to mark Densa’s 10th anniversary.

My secretary, Threnody Higginbottom (we call her Miss Smith around the office), kindly agreed to take the minutes, so we all had to speak very slowly and sometimes repeat what we had said – and it didn’t help that her pencil kept breaking.

I asked Threnody to count the attendance. It was four – Garth Summink, Johannes Smith, Jacob Tsunami and Miss Penelope Smythe – which was a quorum if we counted Jackson the caretaker at the back of the hall waiting, rather impatiently, to close up, and the fact that Penelope had brought along her little cross-eyed Maltese, White Fang.

As P*R*E*S*I*D*E*N*T I adjusted my sash of office, which is of a fetching purple material, although, I noticed too late, it did need pressing and a dab of tetrachloride here and there. It had “PRESIDNAT” proudly emblazoned upon it.

I solemnly declared the meeting open and everybody clapped and the little dog yapped.

I recounted our humble beginnings in 1993 and recounted how, eventually, Densa became far better known than Mensa. There is, after all, a limit to intelligence (you can quantify IQ) but there is no limit to stupidity.

And we have a weekly newsletter. It is no less than The Independent on Saturday, which is a helluva cut above those monthly newsletters Mensa puts out.

I warned my fellow Densans of the fact that high-IQ people were leaving South Africa in droves and this brain drain was throwing an extra burden upon us Densans and very soon we’d be in charge of the country. Indeed, I think we already are.

At this point I made a little aside to myself. Secretly I welcome the brain drain because (dear reader) I have always found intelligent people difficult to understand. I recall driving on the M1 in the rush hour when a female member of Mensa was explaining something on the radio. I had to concentrate so hard that my car juddered to a halt in the middle lane.

Not that I, as P*R*E*S*I*D*E*N*T of Densa, have any grievance against Mensa even if some of them appear to come from somewhere far out in the firmament, like Ladysmith.

For example, I recall a Mensan at a meeting of the Academy for Future Science describing how something “nearly blew my mind”. Seriously. Mensans are very prone to this kind of injury. They can read A Short History of Time while chewing gum but ask them something simple like, “What is the square root of Maritzburg’s municipal deficit?” and it can blow their minds as surely as one can blow an egg with a big hole at one end – phoop!

What, you may wonder, was it that nearly blew that Mensan’s mind?

It was a (serious) statement by a scientist who stated, “Aliens are stealing humans to experiment on them. Some are returned. Some are not.”

This came as no surprise to me. For years I’ve suspected that aliens come in the night and steal people’s brains while they sleep. The brains are then pan-fried in Martian restaurants.

When the victims wake up they are, of course, brainless and, therefore, none the wiser but become seized by a desire to enter politics. Look at Britain right now. And look at us. Thus have aliens come to rule the world. Now where was I? Hey, Threnody! Where was I? And where’s everybody? Where’s our quorum? Where’s it gone? Threnody? Thren… Jackson? Fluffy?

I declare this meeting closed. jcl@onwe.co.za www.jamesclarke.co.za blog://stoeptalk.wordpress.com