EXPLORING THE MYSTERIES OF THE THINKING AT DStv WITH THE MAN AT THE TOP

Dear DStv Subscribers,

Mark

          As one myself I thought I would find out what Mark Rayner had to say about various aspects of what we have been watching that have been bugging me for some time. He is the CEO of MultiChoice the owners of DStv that has a total of some 18-million subscribers, not only in South Africa but in other parts of our continent.

          Here’s what I put to him on Monday 6 July followed by his answers. My additional comments are in italics.

Content & Repeats

Me: As there are so many repeats of shows why is it not possible to ensure that they do not appear at about the same time night after night? This sort of thing happens often. The Graham Norton show on 120 was an example in the last few days.

Mark: Regarding content, as Africa’s most loved storyteller we invest significantly into both local and international content – partnering with both local talent and the world’s best production studios to ensure our customers have an unrivalled selection to choose from.  DStv has one of the lower repeat rates globally, but the amount of TV watched per day in Africa – amongst the highest globally - means repeats are sometimes inevitable. We actively push our channel suppliers for fresher content and have started flagging which content is “new” to promote customer awareness. Channels also have strict performance criteria to ensure fresh hours and ratings remain at acceptable levels. He missed my point which was: It is surely possible, or should be, to schedule shows so that the same repeat does not appear night after night virtually at the same time. I don’t accept that repeats are “inevitable.” They are clearly there because they are cheaper than buying new shows. The “new” labels are very often not true anyway. If DStv was in the shoe business how long would it last if customers heard that the “new” shoes they had bought had already been worn for several days by somebody else?

Promotions

Me: The promos appear to be increasingly over done. The way they interrupt the shows that you are watching without warning sometimes makes you think you have flipped channels by mistake. Talk about Pointless. The one for this even interrupts the actual Pointless show while you are watching it. (I’m not talking about when the promo is connected to the bed that is being advertised). How inane is that? And this sort of thing is not uncommon with other promos. In general they are very often pointless because what they tell you makes nonsense of what you can actually see. As

an example the film MacDonald & Dodd appeared at around 6.00 pm last Saturday with a promo telling us it would be on at 8.00 pm on Monday. The film was repeated again last night (Sunday) at the about the same time while the promo continued to tell us to expect it tonight (Monday) at 8.00 pm. When it was screened on the Monday we were told in the top left hand corner it was NEW.

Mark: On the issue of promotions, it’s important we ensure our customers are aware of what is available to watch so that they get the most of their subscription. That said, a promotion that advertises something in the past is clearly not acceptable. Some promos are scheduled by us as DStv and some by the channel themselves, in this case the BBC. The scheduling of DStv promos has been a manual one which can be prone to human error from time to time. Since we are committed to providing customers with a quality viewing experience, we have introduced a new technology for DStv promo scheduling that will significantly reduce the occurrence of over exposure to a particular promotion by applying more accurate targeting of promos to the relevant viewing segments and limiting the number of runs of any particular promo to avoid overkill.  Regarding the BBC specific promos, we have shared your concerns – and you are not the first customer to raise this – with the BBC to address directly on the channels under their control. Please let us know if you experience any improvement over the coming weeks and months. To clarify with regards to the series, McDonald & Dodds, it premieres on Mondays with repeats on a Wednesday at 21:00, Saturday at 18:50 and Sunday at 20:30 – to give viewers other opportunities to see the show.

Timing of Shows

Me: When it comes to deciding when to put on shows there doesn’t seem to be any planning at all. How sensible is it to have a Christmas episode of QI in June? And to have a Paul O’Grady dog one at 10.00 at night?

Mark: According to our research, and viewership patterns, we find most viewers prefer watching QI in sequence and channels typically do not skip over these for that reason. Unless I can’t see for looking QI has stand alone episodes. They don’t follow one another in any kind of sequence and you don’t have to have watched one episode to enable you to follow the one that comes after that.

Competitions

Me: Regarding competitions like the Great British Bake Off surely it would be better to finish showing the various episodes before starting the repeats otherwise viewers don’t know where they are.

Mark: Third-party channels, for example BBC BRIT which broadcasts among others, the Great British Bake-Off, are responsible for their own broadcasts and content inventory. Although they often broadcast episodes of the same season before the full season ends, we have made them aware that it is confusing to some customers.  Confusing is an understatement. It’s a competition that has quite a number of episodes before the winner is chosen. So if the BBC repeats episodes along the way viewers can be left wondering whether they will ever see the final.

Cricket

Me: When it comes to the shortened form of any type of cricket, who came up with the idea of making them more boring than even the dullest part of a normal test match with every shot being repeated two or three times and even more often if somebody goes out. We are being taken for complete dumb dumbs. Surely people would be more interested in seeing more of the match than all these unrealistic repeats.

Mark: SuperSport remains of the leading sports broadcasters in the world. The team is continuously striving to improve its offering, and with the growth of short format viewing we understand how important this is to satisfy and keep sports fans stimulated. Our production team is constantly improving the quality of highlight packages. At the same time our technology division is exploring a growing global trend to utilise machine learning to improve these highlights.  As a cricket fan and former player myself, I do sometimes share your frustration that a short highlights reel doesn’t capture all the key moments in a game. For that reason we schedule longer highlights versions too for key games. We’ve shared your comments with the SuperSport cricket production team.

My First Question

Me: How about conducting a survey among DStv subscribers to see what they think about all the promos we have to contend with to get some entertainment and various other aspects of what we are given?

Mark: He steered well clear of this question. Would this be too risky in case what the majority of viewers actually think would involve too much of an overhaul of what is currently being screened?

                                               *    *    *    *

Mark finished his reply to me by saying: “We strive at all times to provide an uninterrupted video entertainment service with the best available content for our valued customers.” Do you subscribers agree that this is what you get?

Thanks Mark for your prompt and comprehensive answers.

Regards,

Jon, a Consumer Watchdog who hopes he got his fellow subscribers the answers to some of the concerns they might have had about what we pay for when we sign up for DStv.

 See:DStv's all new claims

THE DAY I WAS NEARLY JAILED FOR BOTTOM PINCHING

Dear Readers,

Daily Mail flight attendants

   When I heard that bottom pinching had been outlawed in Italy it filled me with nostalgia. Italy’s highest court decreed that this is a dirty deed punishable by the full force of the law. It’s just as well the spoil-sports who are now breeding faster than rabbits never got around to dealing with this heinous crime a long time ago otherwise I might still be in jail. It was depressing to read they had added this to the long list of harmless things we are not allowed to do these days, while murderers get away with murder. It won’t be long before the ‘no bottom pinching’ law is extended to the bedroom world-wide.

    Some time ago I flew to Rome on a freebie with a group of Financial Planners – life assurance salesmen who called themselves anything but foot-in-the-door, hard sell merchants. They were going to Rome and London as a prize for out selling everybody else and as a journalist I was invited to tag along as a sweetener to ensure that I never wrote anything detrimental about the firm that was behind it all. These Planners had an unwritten understanding that they would never let on that, as pillars of financial rectitude, they ever sold anything. They merely put the best financial options on the table for their clients to choose from and if they happened to buy, sorry I meant invest in, the odd life policy here and there nobody was going to stop them.

    Now that I no longer feel gagged by that no expense spared, overseas junket I can reveal that whatever name they tried to hide behind their only objective was to sell life assurance by the policy load. Why else would their firm have got a million pound, hall of fame, or whatever they called them, London broker to divulge his secrets of success that had worked so well in Britain? He came up with some gems. His best one was worth noting for all you life assurance peddlers out there, masquerading as friends of the family, or a financial adviser on such a high plain that you would never stoop to something as vulgar as selling.

     “Look through the death columns in the newspapers,” he said. “Get the address of someone who has just died. If he lived at say 10 Church Street, call at every house in the street except number 10 and you’ll sell life assurance like hot cakes.”

      Don’t be appalled by this idea. It comes under the very respectable guise of Financial Planning. “Didn’t your neighbour, who died last week, leave a penniless widow? We wouldn’t want that to happen to your wife do we? So just sign here.” I could hear them say.

     What’s all this got to do with bottom pinching in Italy?  Everything really. It had a vital bearing on the outcome of what happened on the Alitalia flight that took the all male, joke cracking, crowd to Rome. Before we left my wife warned me, light heartedly, not to pinch any bottoms while I was away. The warning was possibly more pertinent because I had some Italian blood, having had ancestors from Turin, although this was my first visit to Italy. Anyway we settled into our seats without incident at Jan Smuts airport, in the days before all the airports had been renamed.

    We were somewhere between Johannesburg and Nairobi when the shock hit us. Drinks were going to be in very short supply. The cabin crew were on a go-slow and generally being as offhand as possible. Suddenly there was a frightening commotion on our side of the plane.An airhostess ran screaming down the isle as though Jack the Ripper was after her.

    I had been sitting on the isle trying to make the best of our parched situation and as she walked past my hand involuntarily wandered to that wiggling behind of hers. It would never have happened if my wife hadn’t given me the idea. I mean what man thinks of these things unaided. In any case I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. You would have thought I had raped the girl the way she was carrying on. I was only doing what millions of Italian men had been doing for years. But what I didn’t know was that as part of this peculiar strike a whole sub-culture was being subverted - bottom pinching was out. Perhaps this was the start of the movement that has now banned it forever.

    The next minute the First Officer appeared at my side trying to extract a confession out of me, without warning me of my rights, not that I probably had any in mid-air over Africa. Sternly he pointed out the Captain had the authority to have me thrown off the plane at Nairobi, where in those apartheid days a polecat would have been given a better reception than a White South African. Looking on the bright side I was thankful they were at least going to wait until we got there.

    Fortunately for me a whole row of salesmen came to my rescue. Calling something that it wasn’t was their speciality. I couldn’t have asked for better eye-witnesses. I never pinched her they all said. I only touched her to get her attention because we all needed a drink, badly. That’s how Financial Planning saved me from a spell in a Kenyan prison.

    An Alitalia public relations officer, who was there to look after us because we were such a big group, took me up front to the almost empty first class section. There he sat me down and apologised. He did his best to fill seats, he told me, while the cabin crews were now trying to empty them. I was very relieved I was not going to end my trip in some hellhole of a jail. After that I only saw the lady who had made all the fuss in the distance, on the other side of the cabin. She was keeping well away from the serial rapist that was me.

    Months later I was at Jan Smuts seeing somebody off when I saw her. I thought it was her. I wasn’t sure. She was with other crew members of an Alitalia flight that had just come in. She was much prettier than I remembered. The way she had screwed up her face in rage had put me off her completely the last time I had seen, what I now believed was the same girl. I was determined to find out if I was right. I had always wanted to know whether she had been genuinely upset or whether she had been putting it on to drive home the aims of the strike. 

    I located the hotel where the Alitalia crews spent their Johannesburg stop-overs. On some pretext or other I got chatting to her. Fortunately she did not connect me to that groping incident. She agreed to have a drink with me. Her English was impeccable. Well, for an airhostess it would have to be wouldn’t it? So I did not need to battle with my non-existent Italian. The next time her flight arrived in Johannesburg she called me at my office and after I had told my wife I would be working late we went out clubbing. This went on for months until one night I finally got up the courage to ask her. The wine had loosened my inhibitions and the red mini she was wearing prompted me. I was thinking only an Italian would be able to get a grip of her because her skirt was so tight. I could just see her sylph-like figure strutting down the Via del Corso in Rome with an octopus of outstretched male arms trying to lay a hand on that soft, tantalising behind of hers.

    I was wondering whether I would spoil everything if I mentioned it. I skated around the subject to begin with, a little fearful. “Leonie,” I said, “Is it right that in Italy men pinch girls’ bottoms all the time? In the street, in lifts and anywhere else where they can get an opportunity?”

    “That’s a compliment Peter,” she replied. She was positively glowing “I just love it. In Italy we know when our beauty is appreciated.”

    I took the opportunity to confess. Tentatively I said, “If it was you, then I was the bottom pincher who sent you screaming down the isle when your cabin crew were on some kind of strike a little while ago.”

    She burst out laughing. Stretching her sensual legs and flicking a blonde lock away from her face she said, “Was my acting that good.  I’ll be a film star soon. You English are so reserved a girl does not know where she is,” she added snuggling up to me and putting her head on my shoulder.

    We were married in Rome. But if it hadn’t been for my wife’s, or should I say my ex-wife’s, idea I would never have got involved with this airhostess, who is now the mother of my two sons. I’m sure my ex now wishes I had been put off that plane in Nairobi. “It would have served him damned well right,” I can hear her saying. May be you’ll understand now why I think prohibiting bum pinching is a bum idea. And if you ask my Italian wife she’ll tell you, “How else would I have got a husband.”

Regards

Jon, a former Sunday Times journalist, unchanged busybody, Consumer Watchdog and Poor Man’s Press Ombudsman.

P.S. This is 80% fact with fiction added for a bit more spice.

P.P.S. In 2003 Italy’s High Court overturned a ruling made in 2001 that pinching a woman’s bottom was not a crime provided it was not premeditated. Under this new decision it became a sexual offence.

DOES SOUTH AFRICA'S ADVERTISING REGULATOR REQUIRE LESS PROOF FOR TRUTH IN ADVERTISING THAN ITS BRITISH COUNTERPART?

Dear Readers,

Adv. Daniel Berger SC

          In 2018 Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that Dr Kurt Wolff’s (Wolff) family business that makes Alpecin Caffeine Shampoo must cease advertising that this can reduce hair loss. This was initiated by a complaint from somebody who knew what they were talking about – a consultant trichologist or hair expert.

          Unfazed by this ruling the German manufacturer made a similar claim in its ads that appeared on South Africa’s DStv last year.

          Alerted by the British ruling I contacted Dana Lebowitz the marketing manager of ADOCO, the South African distributor. I asked her what independent evidence they had that showed this shampoo could reduced hair loss and penetrate the hair follicle, as claimed in the ads. She gave me the run around so I wrote a damning article on my blog in November 2019 saying that these claims were not true. (How true are adverts)

          To this day nobody from either the distributor or the maker has challenged the accuracy of what I wrote.

          Soon after my post appeared I lodged a complaint with our South African Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) because I could not believe that advertising banned in the UK was appearing here in much the same form, unchallenged.

          In the ad a male voice tells viewers: “German engineering for your hair. If hair growth is waning, more and more men choose the caffeine shampoo by Alpecin. During hair washing the highly dosed Alpecin penetrates the hair follicle.”

          The gist of my complaint was that Wolff could not substantiate that the shampoo reduced hair loss and penetrates the hair follicle.

          The ARB Directorate concluded that Wolff had provided sufficient evidence to prove that caffeine does penetrate the hair follicle. So that part of my complaint was dismissed.

          Wolff countered the second more important aspect of my submission by saying its ad did not contain the claim that the shampoo “will reduce hair loss.” 

          Talk about splitting hairs. The Directorate however accepted that this was “implied” by the words “will have a positive effect on ‘waning hair’ or ‘hair loss.’”

          Significantly the ARB sent Wolff an email in January 2020 asking it to substantiate the claim that its shampoo would reduce hair loss. And when this was not forthcoming it upheld my complaint because according to its Code of Conduct advertisers must have documentary evidence to support all claims that are capable of objective substantiation, before ads are published.

          Not satisfied with this Wolff appealed to the Advertising Appeals Committee (Committee) headed by Advocated Daniel Berger SC.

          A new twist was added to the saga when Wolff now produced evidence to validate the “implied claim” that it had previously maintained the Directorate had been wrong to accept. The ARB does however allow new evidence to be submitted at the appeal stage.
          To make Wolff's argument even more ridiculous it continued to maintain that the advertisement "does not impliedly or expressly claim that the product will reduce hair loss."
          Why then did it submit evidence to proved that this is what it's shampoo did?

          Of the various studies Wolff presented, only one was considered relevant by the Committee as, unlike the others, it did mention Alpecin shampoo. Labelled Attachment I it was entitled: Use of Caffeine Shampoo for the treatment of Male Androgenetic Alopecia. In this an unnamed dermatologist confirmed that there had been a reduction of premature hair loss in the 30 men aged 18 to 55, who had been specially chosen to use this shampoo, with a reduction in balding in a significant percentage of them.

          “The product,” it stated, “showed a good cosmetic efficacy in the treatment of male androgenetic alopecia. The results in the pull test showed a decrease of 7.17% after 3 months and 13.15% after 6 months of treatment, of the number of hairs pulled out with pull test to indicate an increase of the resistance to the traction strain of the hair and a decrease of hair loss. These results improved going on with the product use.” The underlining appears to have been done by the Committee to emphasise what it considered important.   

          My inquiries indicated that this was one of the eight studies submitted to the British regulator when it decided to ban Alpecin’s ‘misleading’ advertising. Its comment on the pull test mentioned in this was: “We understood there were more robust methods of measuring hair loss available.” 

          “We can confirm that we did assess a study entitled Use of Caffeine Shampoo for the treatment of Male Androgenetic Alopecia in our Dr Kurt Wolff and Co march 2018 ruling,” Freddie Alcock at the ASA’s Media and Public Relations office told me.

          It was Attachment I that appears to have clinched the Committee’s decision that the shampoo did indeed reduce hair loss. It contained the only reference to hair pull tests in the 11 page report of the Appeals Committee Decision sent to me by the ARB. The second phase of my complaint thus went to the way of the first part, it was dismissed.

         So did a study that failed to convince the British regulator that Wolff’s advertising was kosher prove enough to do the opposite when it was submitted half a world away to South Africa’s ARB?

This was according to Business Insider SA in 2018

          Wolff had argued that the UK’s ASA decision was based on a strict standard of substantiation similar to that required for pharmaceutical products that was not common in Europe. In any event, as the Directorate did not consider the decision relevant to this South African case, the Committee did much the same thing.

          In banning the ad that appeared in Britain because of insufficient substantiation the ASA said: “Consumers would understand the claim to mean that using the product would result in a reduced rate and quantity of hair loss. Taking into account the body of evidence as a whole, we considered that we had not seen any studies of the actual product as used by consumers on their scalp using an accurate and objective analysis of hair growth, in a well-designed and well conducted trial.”

          Gail Schimmel the exceptionally efficient CEO of the ARB told me that the UK claim was slightly different to the South African one. The evidence Wolff submitted met the requirement of the Code of her regulator.

          “I am of the opinion that you got a well-considered, in depth decision that should leave you in no doubt as to the quality of our *self-regulatory process,” she added.

         Who is right, Britain’s advertising standards authority or South Africa’s? The consumer has been left to find out the hard way by first paying for the shampoo.

To answer the question raise in the headline to this post, the answer is: Yes, the ARB does require less proof than the UK’s ASA as this case showed.  

Regards,

Jon, a Consumer Watchdog, who can’t win them all.

P.S. The Wolff Company can only blame its poor public relations for my first report and some equally poor management for not submitting its full back-up story when the ARB initially considered my complaint.

P.P.S. In this case the ARB increased its inquiry costs unnecessarily by allowing the defendant to submit additional evidence to the Appeal Committee, when it had amply opportunity to do so at the initial hearing and was actually asked to do this, but chose not to.

*Note: the ARB is appointed and paid for by the South African advertising industry.

THE CORONA VIRUS PANIC SPREADERS

Dear South African readers,

Alan Winde

          The Western Cape Provincial Government is playing prediction games to produce shocking figures to PANIC us into believing that the number of Corona deaths will jump from the current 1008 to an incredible 9 300.

          In a front page lead story recently the Sunday Times revealed that our ANC National Government had not been putting us fully in the picture about its Virus plans because it did not want to spread PANIC.

          Alan Winde the Democratic Alliance’s Western Cape Premier has been getting these startling figures from Dr Sheetal Silal a senior lecturer in the Department of Statistical Science at the University of Cape Town. She is also head of the Modelling and Simulation Hub, Africa (MASHA).

          Winde it seems is putting more faith in maths than doctors and scientists to tell him what the Virus is likely to do next.  And what’s more it’s maths that is like the video games Minecraft or Simcity, according to Dr Silal.

          Her research ‘games’ involve mathematical modelling where she says you use a “virtual reality of how a disease might spread.”

          The UCT News quoted her as saying that her most surprising research finding was that it was only possible to eliminate malaria in South Africa if the incidence of it was dramatically lowered in our neighbouring Mozambique - hardly a dramatic conclusion.

          What is surprising is that with this as her background she has been called upon to predict the death toll among 6-million people when there must be numerous other people better qualified. 

          It’s like calling in an expert like her to tell you if you are likely to get Covid- 19 because your wife, who sleeps with you in the same bed, has got it. 

          Her maths calculations have revealed that the Western Cape death toll predictions, in other words guesses that have risen from 4500 to 6500 will now rocket up to 9300.

          She hedges her bets by saying: “This may not play out over the long term. What we may find is that the mortality rate may change in the coming weeks and will adjust our overall predictions taking that into account.”

          You don’t need to be any kind of expert to arrive at this kind of conclusion. Just about anybody could have told Winde that and saved the Province the cost of the doctor’s fee.

          According to her “Galileo said: ‘Mathematics is the language in which God has written the Universe.’ We can use maths to portray how a disease behaves, examine how we can intervene to manage it and even learn new things about its epidemiology.”

          Surely if God had anything to do with it we would not have a Virus like this that is bringing so much suffering to people around the world.

          Not to be outdone by the Western Cape the Eastern Cape’s Command Council has joined the PANIC Promoters with a guesstimate of 5500 to 6000 deaths over the next three months. They’ll have to get a move on as only 138 people have been killed by the Virus so far.

          Having watched the seven news channels that are available to me ever since this PANIC started I was amazed to see one of them interviewing a doctor a couple of days ago and he told us something I had never heard any so called scientist or expert tell us about the Virus before.

          His message was: We should be concentrating on the 98% of infected people who have survived the Virus and not the relatively small number who have died.

          Why are there so few people like him? Not only does he have the sense to realise the importance of this but he also has the guts to say it on television. I won’t tell you who he is in case he gets ostracised by the PANIC Promoters. They are very much in the majority aided and abetted by every government in the world, because you can’t keep populations adhering to a host of unnecessary Corona regulations without keeping them in a constant state of PANIC.

          And the proven way to do this is with unending, regular doses of Death statistics, both real and predicted.

          CNN recently carried a message on the screen before its news bullets telling us in effect that the only way to beat the Virus is with facts, nothing else.

          Well, predictions are not facts so if CNN is right we are being hoodwinked by governments that keep giving us outlandish guesstimates to frighten the hell out of us. What other purpose could they possibly serve?

Regards,

Jon

P.S. Keep well. Unfortunately we will all be affected by the crazy PANIC that is devastating far more lives than any Virus. It’s hard to believe that MAN, the so called most sophisticate form of life on this planet could be stampeded into mass destruction by a Virus so small that nobody can actually see it.

See: corona- the truth 

COULD THE WAY BRITAIN HAS BEEN DEALING WITH ITS TB PROBLEM WORK WITH THE CORONA VIRUS

Dear Fellow Humans,

          Even though this delightful little animal has been protected in Britain since 1973 under the Badger Act more than 100 000 have been killed since a Government sanctioned cull began in 2011.

          They were eliminated because badgers got the blame for spreading bovine TB in cattle that causes huge losses to farmers each year as they have to slaughter thousands of animals once this gets going in a herd. The cost to farmers exceeds 100m pounds a year.

          Much like the way Corona is being dealt with, the so called experts and other interested parties disagreed on the validity of the success of this culling as a means of containing bovine TB.

          According to Lord Krebs, whose study of the science of bovine TB resulted in the 10 year culling trial: “Research shows how important it is to find out about badger behaviour. Culling them can cause the survivors in areas to move around more resulting in them coming into contact with infected cattle and so spread the TB.

          “The ill-thought-out plan to control TB by culling Badgers could therefore backfire,” he added.
           Below is my dog and the badger I rescued See:Killings that divide a nation

          Unlike Corona there is a vaccine against bovine TB. Badgers can be captured and vaccinated. Those that test positive however are destroyed. Unfortunately farmers are not convinced that this is nearly as effective as widespread culling.

          Dominic Dyer, head of the Badger Trust, described the cull as “the largest destruction of a protected species in living memory.”

          It is comforting for badgers to know that the Government’s killing guidelines stipulated that “all reasonable precautions must be taken to ensure that no badger is subject to unnecessary suffering.”

          After approving this wholesale slaughter of almost an entire species, the Government seems to have had a change of mind. Last month it announced that culling would be phased out in favour of vaccinating.

Carrie Symonds being badgered

          Was this perhaps due to the influence of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds, an animal rights activist and patron of the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation?

Meanwhile man has a far bigger problem that is entirely self made to worry about than whether or not badgers spread bovine TB, and he’s making just as big a mess of it as those who signed the death sentence for these extremely active animals that have the softest fur imaginable.

          THE ILL-THOUGHT-OUT PLAN TO CONTROL THE CORONA VIRUS BY SHUTTING DOWN THE WORLD HAS COMPLETELY BACKFIRED. THE DISASTEROUS ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCE WILL DEVASTATE FAR MORE LIVES THAN ANY VIRUS, WHILE ONLY A TINY FRACTION OF THE WORLD’S 8-BILLION PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY DIE.

What’s a badger when man has all but shot the African rhino to extinction for its horns with elephants following them into oblivion for their tusks? He is busy fishing out oceans: killing the marine life that’s left with tons of plastic waste and fogging up the globe so that if people don’t need to wear masks because of COVID-19 they will still have to wear them to breath.

Is man’s approach to the Virus so suicidal that it will be the only antidote to global warming? Since the lockdown people in India reported seeing the Himalayas on the horizon for the first time in many years. The artificial smog that had been hiding the snow capped peaks miraculously disappeared once its producers were safely locked away.

YOU KNOW WHO SHOULD REALLY BE CULLED ON A MASSIVE SCALE, AND IT WOULD NOT BE JUST IN THE HOPE OF SAVING OUR SPECIES, BUT EVERY OTHER FORM OF LIFE.

Regards,

Jon, who once rescued a baby badger from certain death while working as a journalist in Exeter, Devon SEE:Killings that divide a nation

P.S. Badgers are about the size of an average cat. They live in a network of tunnels known as a sett in woodland areas and come out mainly at night to feed on worms; other insects; berries and small mammals like mice. 

IF BIRDS COULD GET CORONA THE VIRUS WOULD HAVE BEEN RAMPANT IN WAKKERSTROOM

Dear Readers,
This makes a change from the usual DearJon Letter – a post written by Jane my publisher of Boutique Books fame. She is so efficient that I got replies to my emails almost before I sent them 24/7. Anyway here it is from the little dorp renowned as a birder’s paradise where 370 different species have been recorded.

"Jon rather rudely said that we in Wakkerstroom were no doubt safe from Covid-19 as he was sure that the virus had never heard of our little town. And it is true that very few people know its name. I suspect, though, that viruses don’t need to know the name of anywhere in order to infect them. A town like Wakkerstroom depends on tourism for its survival, and that means that we have a fair number of people visiting from overseas. This meant that particularly the staff and owners of the restaurants (of which we have a large number, and very fine they are too) and the guest houses had been recently exposed to quite a lot of people from Europe. So, in fact, there was a fair chance that the nasty germs could have snuck their way in. And had they snuck in before the lockdown, there would have been a very good chance that it would have spread quickly, as ours is quite a close community.

            "Of course, lockdown in a dorp is a bit different from lockdown in a city. On day one, I imagined what it must have been like in Jo’burg or Cape Town. How quiet. How still. I never imagined that we could get any quieter or stiller than we usually are, but we did.

            "The dorp of Wakkerstroom consists of a total of 595 large plots in the town proper, and then eSizamaleni, the township at the far edge. In total, there are about 600 people who live in Wakkerstroom, and about 7000 who live in eSizamaleni. At first, some of the less generous people in town felt very sure (without having verified it) that everyone in eSizamaleni was wandering around their part of the town, taking no notice of the lockdown regulations. I, however, checked in frequently with all my staff and they were quite clear that they and everyone else were staying in their homes. There was a very noticeable police presence (because of stock theft, which is huge around here in farming country, we have quite a large police force) in both eSizamaleni and on the streets of Wakkerstroom and anyone rash enough to wander was soon sent home.

The 'away from it all' that so many of us are trying to get used to in much of
 South Africa is nothing knew to the residents of Wakkerstroom

            "Those of us who are privileged enough to live in the dorp itself all have quite a lot of space as our properties are generally quite large. I have a flourishing vegetable garden and a young but developing fruit orchard, and a large number of people here do grow at least some vegetables. I am almost self-sufficient as it is, so have found it quite unnecessary to go to the shops at all, except to get milk so that I can continue to make cheese, kefir and yoghurt as I usually do.

            "We are all, however, quite used to not having easy access to shops as our closest Spar is twenty-six kilometres away (and, something which many incomers to the town find very difficult to deal with, our closest Woolworths is seventy-five kilometres away, and in another province, nogal). In the dorp itself, there are a few general dealers and a quite-recently-opened but small grocery shop, but all of these either stayed closed or ran very short hours.

            "In the main shopping street, the bakery opened three mornings a week and the dairy was open every morning. And apart from that, there was the internet café, also open only a few hours a day, where at least people could buy their airtime, data and electricity, and the garage. Otherwise, everywhere was closed.

             "The internet café is called Wakkerstroom Central, and it provides basic services like photocopying and (amazingly still) faxing, as well as access to PCs. It is something I started to help the many young people in the area who have little or no access to computers or the internet, or to basic facilities that allow them to send out CVs and so on. We are one of the only places in the area where you can buy airtime and electricity at face value. I employ three young people who do a great job of running the place. Because it has to be staffed full time (08h00 to 18h00, every day except Christmas and New Year’s days) it loses quite a lot of money, so Boutique Books subsidises it.

            "There are no banks in Wakkerstroom. There is a Standard Bank ATM, but it does not accept deposits. There is also an FNB ATM, but it is mostly locked away and it also does not accept deposits.

            "Our dorp was like a ghost town. There were no cars to be seen anywhere, and no people. There were definitely more birds in town than usual, though.

            "I was forced to go to Volksrust twice, in order to deposit money from the internet café into the bank, and I saw no-one on the road until I got to the town. The road was, however, full of birds that flew up as the car approached. It felt quite Hitchcock-ish. In Volksrust, the Spar and Shoprite (the only two grocery stores) were busy, and there were extremely long queues snaking along the pavements as people waited patiently to get in. But almost everywhere else was closed. I was extremely glad not to have to buy anything.

            "Both shops were closed down (on the last day of level 5 lockdown) because a merchandiser who had been unpacking stock in both stores was found to be infected. As it was month end, this was a quite dreadful blow to everyone as the next-closest place in Mpumalanga is Ermelo, which is 125 kilometres away, and really not reachable by the average person in eSizamaleni. They are still closed but will hopefully open soon.

            "I am told that many people have been very busy getting together on the Wakkerstroom Facebook page, and that there have been interesting challenges and competitions and some wonderful photographs uploaded. I don’t “do” social media, so I have been left out of those opportunities to socialise. However, I spent a lot more time than usual on the telephone and was surprised by the people who popped up at the end of the line.

            "Most people around here are retired, but I still have to work every day, and was fortunate to have a lot of work to do, so for me things went on pretty much as normal. Oddly, though, I still felt it necessary to cook up treats that I would never normally contemplate – Feijoa with meringues and cream, muffins with rhubarb and raspberries, blackberry fool. Somewhere I guess I still felt the need for some kind of comfort.

            "My dogs took lockdown badly. They were used to going out for a walk in the late afternoon (after the goats have gone home to bed) and on day one they were extremely perturbed when instead I walked round and round the garden. On day two, they were more than perturbed; they were incensed. My younger dog is a real handful and it has been difficult to keep her properly exercised. I continued to walk my usual eight kilometres a day every day, but round the garden, which now has a deep track circumventing the property. Quite soon, the dogs decided that this was just silly, and they took to just running from one corner of the house to other, watching me disappear around the corner as I started my circuit and then taking the short route to watch me coming round the other side.

Her dogs Emma and Sukey

            "At 06h00 on May the 1^st, allowed at last to leave the property, we were out and racing up the hill. It had to be 06h00 so that we could be up the hill and back again before the goats got out of bed and started wandering around. My dogs have a passionate dislike for goats."
Thanks for the contribution Jane,
Regards
Jon

  

A DEARJON CORONA SCOOP - Confessions of a top Government Minister verbatim

Dear South Africans,

          This is a huge DearJon Corona Scoop – a verbatim copy of what a senior South Africa Minister plans to tell us in the next few weeks.

          “I felt it was my duty in these trying times to put you right about exactly what you will be forced to do in the various lockdown stages that we have come up with entirely for your own protection. As the Kick Butt Minister my duty is to coordinate everything. Before I give you the details I must say it hasn’t been helpful for the DA party to label me the Minister of Confusion when I have been doing my best to make sure our people sail through this disruption in their lives as easily as possible.

          “The DA could have been more original. Our President had already bagged that title when he announced cigarettes could be sold again. He inadvertently failed to consult our Honourable Minister of Bad Habits, who promptly overruled him. Having had considerable experience of telling a President what to do during her 16 year stint as wife of our previous President, it was felt she knew best. In any case she had science on her side.

          “Before deciding that all the smokers in the country would have to go without their cigs because they compromise lungs and that’s where Corona hits first, she consulted our two best known illegal cigarette racketeers. If anybody should know how bad legal cigarettes (those that boost our tax revenue by millions) are it’s these two gentlemen.

          “Any suggestion that by reversing what our President said will give these wide boys millions more in under the table money is totally unfounded. Our Minister of Bad Habits has assured me that these men have given her their word that this will not happen.

          “She knows she can rely on them because they are good friends. Like her and the rest of us they only want the best for cigarette smokers.

There's no smoke for these gentlemen without a helpful Minister

          “We’ve had a few initial mishaps in Stage 5 that our President has decided, provided one of my fellow honourable Ministers doesn’t have a better idea, should not be allowed to happened again when we open more stages.

          “I don’t know if I should tell you this. You know how unpatriotic our DA is. They do everything to try and make our ANC party look more stupid than it is. And I don’t want that Helen woman to come out of her Twitter hibernation to tell the world that our country would have done a much better job of it if the Virus had hit us in Colonial times.

          I saw a tweet from that trouble maker Jon that I can’t leave unchallenged. He claimed that he would not give a cent to any charity administered by our Government  because, judging by the millions we spent on bringing those highly trained Cuban doctors here to help, the Government can’t be trusted to spend our money wisely.

          “This is completely untrue. As the Gupta Brothers would tell us, if only they were here, their charitable offerings were pocketed extremely furtively under the direction of our former President Zuma.

          “At our most recent get together we Ministers discussed the possibility of sending a charter plane to India to bring the Brothers here to advise us on how best to capture this Virus.  After all this should be child’s play for them; you’ve got to have a lot upstairs to capture a country the size of ours with 60-m people.

          “Our President and the rest of us Ministers have agreed to take an 80% salary cut to get them here if they’ll come. I’m convinced they will reduce their normal consultancy fee to help a country that has been so good to them. They will of course receive immunity from prosecution, much like those illegal cigarette barons are getting as part of our ‘Fight Corona’ master plan.

          “We are so lucky to have a President who was a top businessman. With him at the helm it won’t be long before all those derogatory ratings about the state of our economy will be gone. He is doing his best for our country. Our Minister of Police is busy tracking down that person; I think it was that Jon again, who made a derogatory tweet about him after he messed up on TV when putting his mask back on. This could have happened to anybody but this person chose to tweet: ‘Luckily he didn’t show us how to wash our hands.’  

          “Anyway what I was going to tell you is that in an effort to get the economy rolling, so as to reduce starvation as much as possible, we decided to allow roadside stalls to open as they are run by the poorest members of our informal sector, you know jovial one parent Mamas battling to feed numerous kids.

          “You would have thought that our officials on the ground would have warned us that this was not a good idea and could only damage the ANC’s name still further. If I had my way I would have got rid of the lot ages ago, starting with those top managers, who have been on suspension for years on full pay.

          “Hundreds of them, particularly in Kwazulu-Natal, rushed to man their stalls that had been standing empty for weeks. They stacked them with cabbages and various other things that they usually sell and sat there like fisherman waiting for a bite. The bites never came.

          “It wasn’t even raised at any of our Ministerial Waffles that this could happen. So it came as a complete surprise to all of us that roadside stalls are pointless when we have gone to so much trouble to keep everyone off the roads.  

          “I must emphasise that our President had no part in this Corona bungle, but I do think our Minister of Bad habits should have seen it coming if she hadn’t been spending so much time with her illegal cigs pals. Some people say she’s so involved with them she can’t be fagged to do anything else. There’s some unfounded (aren’t they all) rumour that she befriended them to get financial backing for her bid to become President when her ex Jacob Zuma got the boot. Money talks. No wonder she thinks she’s the President now. 
          “I’m afraid I’m going to blame our officials again for this one, although it wasn’t entirely their fault. It didn’t come up at any of our Ministerial meetings until the damage had been done. The sale of seed to farmers was banned. Our scientists told us that seeds go through numerous hands before they get to farmers, whereas this was not the case for tractors. You know how hands are blamed for much of the way the Virus spreads, so our officials had to go with the scientists. It was sheer luck that this was stopped before we ran out of food. Farmers now have enough tractors to last a life time. John Deere never had it so good.

          “Before I go I would like to thank our Minister in the Hat, whose name escapes me, for ensuring that nobody dares to defy the lock down any more. It was a wise move for our cops, ably backed by the army, to knock hell out of anybody found on our streets, when we’ve warned them repeatedly not to give our law enforcers any lip.

          “I must single out another stalwart of our party for special praise. He’s quite a card. I know he’s not a Minister but he does have a very powerful position in our party structure.

          “How about this for an outstanding philanthropic gesture? He’s agreed not to sue the author of a completely libellous book that was written about him on condition that the author agrees to give 50% of the book’s sales to the Solidarity Fund. It’s called something like What a State We’re In. An agreement has now been reached because he is confident that nobody will believe what has been written about him in the book, anyway. This is the kind of gutter journalism we in the ANC have to put up with all the time.

          “Oh! I nearly forgot here’s a couple more things I need to clarify. Running between 6.00 am and 9.00 am will only be allowed if you are not fleeing from the police or the army. I didn’t choose these times, but there must be some scientific reason for them. I must just warn you that it’s pitch dark at 6.0 am in the Cape at this time of year as winter sets in, so take a torch to make sure you don’t bump into another runner and watch out for muggers. Cape Town has a bit of a reputation for these.

          “Queueing for food will be restricted to a 20 kilometer line and nobody, other than law enforcement officers will be allowed to drive up and down the queue. It of course means no mini-bus taxis. We all know how just one taxi accident can put up our Corona death toll by 20% or more.

          “On the plus side at least we’ve solved the traffic problem, although I must warn those who are legally allowed to be on the roads, that the idea was not to turn them into another Kyalami race track.

          “You must all realise that lockdown is working. You may not think so if you are starving, but our scientists have assured us that’s a lot better than getting the Corona Virus. That’s the least we in the ANC are aiming for – the best of a bad job.

          “Thank you all for listening. Just stick to the rules for the benefit of all of us.”

This is the first scoop of this magnitude that I have had for my little blog. I owe it entirely to having the right contacts that are prepared to stick their necks out to make sure somebody like me gets the news first.

Keep well, See also:Corona virus truth we should face

Regards

Jon