Bodies that don’t function vs little marvels
ASOMBRE Stoep or a cheery Stoep? Trickier than you think. Merriment belongs in life, but one feels false blocking out the real world. In my real world this word “dysfunctional”, which didn’t even exist until well into my life, hammers new nails into the mind every day.
Take the stunning statement by Zweli Mkhize – 87 municipalities are now dysfunctional, up from 55 in March. Another 87 are “almost dysfunctional”. Was this jaw-dropping or what? Did our jaws drop, or not? Not a damn, that story got about the same level of ink and airtime as the report on racism rising in the public service.
Which was delicious, was it not? Headlines, the ones I saw, conveyed such a heart-sink first impression –geez, even in civil-service itself – that it took a moment for the figures to sink in and let you laugh out loud.
Yep, racism had gone up, a huge 42%! The 2.1 million-strong public service had reported 12 incidents in 2016. Last year, it went up to 17, which included phrases like “you Bushies”.
Looks like double oddity to me; make nothing of an implosion and make a hue-and-cry of nothing, but that’s where we’re at – the more the Great God Transformation injures us, the more of it we demand, and then aim at the traditional villain to distract attention.
My week went more awry in firsthand municipal dealings. You were going to get an essay on nice people with nice intentions being made liars by systems that don’t work. But what the heck, or WTF in the modern version, further exploiting the world’s most all-purpose word. Enough sombre. Let’s turn to marvels.
We talked on this Stoep once before of a huge oddity. It took a whole generation after humankind devised a bomb to kill 100 000 people in one go, before it devised a way to put wheels on a suitcase. For those wheels we owe a New York manufacturer of raincoats, lugging two heavy cases at Miami airport after a holiday.
His wheels, though, went only half the way. His suitcase had four wheels and you trailed it on a leash like a dog, but it lacked the dog’s built-in gyroscope and kept falling over. This went on for 15 years until a 1980s airline pilot gave a case two wheels and a firm pulling-handle, thus transforming the world.
Those two were great contributors. They may not have applied the same years of study and dedication as J Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi and the other atom-bomb inventors, but, hey, they did us good. We should have statues to them.
This morning, while cleaning my fingers after toast and honey, I thought of another great inventor – one who turned honey bottles and shampoo, etc, on their heads.
Enquiry reveals a less classically human story. In 1995, the Heinz corporation, mega-producer of tomato sauce – ketchup to them – commissioned an enquiry into that great 20th century quandary, how to get the last of the ketchup out of the bottle. They’d tried squeezable bottles, but the noise they made was gross. Kids all round the restaurant burst out laughing.
So we owe the upside-down bottle to a team of professionals, would you believe, but there’s a very human twist. Soon afterwards, Paul Brown, chain-smoking proprietor of a silicone moulding-shop squashed between a scrapyard and a saloon in a Michigan dorp, came upon the ridges that squeezable bottles now have in their sides.
So now we have it all – gravity, accurate pour and no farting sounds. Genius lives. Will a genius please now get that honey to stop spreading around the outside of the bottle?