How to violate human rights in your spare time

This is my first current news article. Laminate it for future generations.

In the varsity newspaper today there was an article about a group of freshmen complaining that their right of religion has been violated. And what pray tell violated this most sacred-when-it-suits-us of rights? It seems that they attended a motivational speech that was NOT christian oriented. In fact it was totally devoid of all religious references and purely dealt with motivational skills out of a secular psychological perspective. THE HORROR. Totally trampling over all their god-given human rights in the process it seems. (I'll stop with the puns, just not anytime soon).

The worst thing is I'm not so sure the varsity newspaper reported this in the same spirit that I read this. As previously quickly noted I attend a very conservative university that actually up to a few years ago labelled itself as christian-oriented in its title. The constitution finally caught up to this idea and we're now just North West University (as original a place as it sounds). But it seems old habits die hard and now they are actually complaining about the absence of something that in any normal place would rather have caused the controversy.

Amazing. Sometimes I pinch myself just to make sure I haven't succumbed and ended up in christian heaven. Only the absence of incessant singing indicates that I still inhabit this vale of tears.

Jihad on blogspot ...

Which I mean in the nicest way possible, of course

Two posts back I stated that one of my short term goals on blogspot was to figure out how to get to other blogs on blogspot. This I figured out in the remarkable short time of a year. And my reward? Almost everytime I try to access a random blog I for some reason end up at this page where this kid posts cartoons about his life and times with the prophet Muhammed. Stimulating as it may have been the first time it's strange to me that this site crops up 3 out of 5 times I click on 'random next blog'.

Conspiracy? Nah, just one of those flukes that will get someone beheaded.

What one won't do for self-gratification ...

Yes, everything and up to and including THAT.

Ok, so I'm not a post-creating machine. What a surprise. The reasons I'm actually doing this at all is that I've started reading other peoples blogs. Well, first off let me say that I won't be able to and not even try match up to the quality of some of the stuff I've read out there. Well done guys for bestowing yet another inferiority complex on me, this total stranger that's never done anything to you. Well, keeping to my goal of getting someone else to actually read and in some small way be interested in something I write I'm going to keep at this and see what develops.

So the question becomes; do I have anything interesting to write about? Well, let's list a few possible topics that I actually do have some experience in and let's see what develops from there:

1.) Being a white south african twenty-something guy ...
2.) ... in an extremely conservative christian university ...
3.) ... while being an avowed atheist myself ...
4.) ... and not getting a degree any time soon due to personal laziness ...
5.) ... even though this is already my fifth year on a four year course.

Nope, nothing remotely interesting in those topics, so let's move on. Let's talk about the sugar-levels of carbonated drinks in the good ol' U S of A. This December vacation I decided to jump the pond and broaden my horizons a bit. Maybe there is intelligent life outside the north-west province of South Africa? I decided to find out...

I'm going to jump past all other types of interesting happenings while there and get straight to my point. Which is that Americans are not fat because of fast foods or inactivity or any of the main culprits, rather that they are a mullet-sprouting obese species because of the huge amounts of sugar in the sorry excuse for soft drinks they have there. This I say without any supporting evidence other than the extreme nausea I felt everytime I dared to drink anything out of a can. In my defence I was fooled by recognizable brand names which I later found out did not mean the contents of the can would not be in any way comparable to what we have here in Africa.

For some reason the post-production step where the syrupy concentrate that would normally be diluted before being sold to unsuspecting consumers was entirely skipped. You end up with a liquid (and I use this term loosely) with a higher percentage of fructose than your average sugar-cube.

Stop drinking that filth you silly Americans! Can't you see that this lies at the root of all your current troubles? With lower sugar levels you will have less ADD kids, less sugar-induced gun violence and less trigger-happy presidents. That's right, get Kubya off the pepsi and let there be world peace again!

Maybe in a future post I will tell my audience how it came about that I was nearly perforated by a genuine Iraqi war-knife by an angry neighbour (hereafter referred to as That Crazy Bitch), why you should not trust Brazilians with pink charge slips and even perhaps the best tactics when cleaning toilets in the apartment of six guys.

But then again, maybe I won't.