Bleakness of prohibition stretches ahead
SIGH! A bleak July stretches ahead. Will the level 4 lockdown be lifted after a fortnight? I’ll ask the fairies at the bottom of my garden.
But let’s try to be positive. The Politburo, er Command Council, who decide these things has discovered that the safest place to be in a Covid-19 pandemic is, after all, a windy beach, preferably in the surf. Breakthrough! The beaches stay open.
Is it possible that they could discover within a fortnight that the person sitting at home watching TV and taking a snifter or two will not be infected by the virus nor spread it? That he needs a liquor store to get himself ensconced in that situation?
As they say in Bonnie Scotland, I hae ma doots. I sense an impulse to try American-style Prohibition, an instinct to keep bossing people around. But I’m eager to be proved wrong.
Disinformation dozen
THE anti-vac campaign in the US keeps breaking fresh ground. The latest tactic is to say vaccination makes you go magnetic. This was brought up during a hearing in Ohio of the state’s House health committee by physician Sherri Tenpenny, writes Huffington Post. She has been cited by a watchdog group as one of the “Disinformation dozen”, the 12 people responsible for 65% of antivaccine misinformation shared on the internet …
Tenpenny said. “I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the internet of people who have had these shots and now they’re magnetised. You can put a key on their forehead, it sticks. You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick.”
An anti-vaccine nurse (who had presumably had the jab) tried to prove it before the committee by showing how a key would stick to her, but it clattered to the floor.
Actually the key was made of non-magnetic aluminium. Maybe the anti-vaccinists need to change their pitch. It doesn’t make you magnetic, it makes you stoopid.
Attention-grabber
SPIDERMAN meets Pope Francis … he was the attention-grabber at the pontiff’s weekly audience, according to Associated Press.
Matteo Villardita, 28, dons the comic-book super-hero outfit to cheer up children in hospital.
Villardita said: “It was exciting because Pope Francis immediately understood my mission.”
The Vatican described Villardita as “really a good super-hero”. During Italy’s long months of pandemic lockdown he made more than 1 400 video calls, since he wasn’t able to visit in person, to help ailing children smile.
Sardine run
AN INTERESTING seasonal ad. “For only R3 000 we come to your house dressed as a coronavirus rescue team to rescue you from your wife. We take you to the Sardine Run for 14 days’ quarantine and bring you back home afterwards.”
Technocrat birds
A GRAPHIC comes this way showing birds sitting perched in mid-air, wings folded, beside a pole. Speech bubble from one: “It’s a bit freaky this wireless technology.”
Tailpiece
WHAT sleeps at the bottom of the ocean?
Jack the kipper.
Last word
I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t. | W Somerset Maugham.