Too hectic for comfort
THE Washington soapie is becoming altogether too fast-moving and hectic for comfort.
To recapitulate: President Donald Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey. The very next day he entertained at the White House the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador.
Next, intelligence sources leaked to the media that, during the talks with the Russians, Trump blabbed classified information.
Things have now gone into overdrive. Democrats are crying: “Watergate!” The satirists are crying: “Blabbergate!” (The Republicans are pretty quiet.)
And now it’s emerged that Comey has documents recording that Trump had asked him to call off the FBI investigation of General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former intelligence adviser (already fired for fibbing about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador).
Washington has gone into a frenzy (and the Russians are said to be rolling about with laughter in Moscow, according to Western foreign correspondents based there). This is chaos. It’s happening just as Trump prepares for a visit to the Middle East, his first foray abroad since taking office.
And what a distraction. At this rate, when will Trump be able to get round to his programme of building a wall around Mexico or repealing the environmental legislation and regulations of the past 40 years?
Mousetraps
AGATHA Christie’s murder mystery play, The Mousetrap, has been running for 65 years in London’s West End. It’s become a stop on the tourism trail, like the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace.
British trampolinists Daniel Gruchy and Gavin Free set up a Mousetrap that ran for all of four seconds.
They spent four hours painstakingly arranging 1 000 loaded mousetraps on a trampoline. Then they leapt on to the trampoline and spectacularly and painfully set off all the traps in four seconds.
It’s gone viral on the internet, as these things do.
Another one for the Guinness Book of World Records? Daft, I call it.
Wild boar
DIPLOMACY can have its tricky moments, but being charged by a wild boar is not usually one of them.
The British ambassador to Austria, Leigh Turner, was taking a stroll in the woods in a park near Vienna when suddenly he was charged by an enraged boar.
“I heard a noise behind me like a galloping horse, and turned to see a massive wild boar, head down, charging straight at me,” he wrote on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, according to the BBC.
To escape, he shinned up some slippery tree trunks and the boar eventually wandered off.
Will Turner next be posted to this country? Wild boars are excellent training for dealing with a charging rhino. He already knows the drill about climbing trees in a hurry.
Slap and tickle
MUNICIPAL workers in the small Swedish town of Overtornea are grinding their teeth in frustration. A proposal that they should be given an hour off every week to go home for a bit of slap and tickle with their partner was voted down by conservative elements on the council.
The proposer, Per-Erik Muskos, told the BBC the goal was to improve people’s relationships.
“People have so many other things to do. When you are at home you have social media, you have to take your children to football and ice hockey, you don’t have time to take care of each other and have time together without children.”
Overtornea council have voted instead to give the town’s 550 municipal workers an hour off a week for “sports activities”.
Sweden is a country of great subtlety.
Footballer
THE other day reader R Brooklyn asked for information about South African footballer Gordon Hodgson, who had a spectacular career in England in the 1920s. Where in South Africa did he come from?
Between them, Mark Wright, Wallie Latham and John Hyde say he was born in Johannesburg in 1904.
He played for Benoni Football Club, Rustenburg Football Club and Transvaal before going to England to play for Liverpool, Aston Villa and England. He died in Stoke-on-Trent in 1951.
Tailpiece
THIS fellow walks into a florist’s. “I’d like some flowers please.”
“Certainly, sir. What do you have in mind?” “Um, I’m not sure.” “Perhaps I can help. What have you done?”
Last word
I HAVE no special talent. I am only passionately curious. – Albert Einstein