Oh, happy day! the billboard poet is at work again. Most notably:

ALL BLACKS ARE AMAZING!
and
TIGER'S WIFE HAS KITTENS!

In defiance of the evidence both of these are probably about sport, rather than, respectively, affirmative racial politics and Zooborns. But they made me giggle despite the fact that I woke up at 5.30am angsting about the training sessions I'm giving today, and was at work by 6.45 in a state of smouldering resentment.

In other news, Ursula Vernon finally does the gold-leaf Klimt thing to owls, with predictable results, i.e. it's marvellous:

.

Want.

Today's amusing billboard: LEE-ANN SNOGS A BOYTJIE!! I don't know who the hell Lee-Ann is, but I'm very amused by the language choice of the headline. For a start, "snog" is unabashed Brit slang while "boytjie" is very much a South-Africanism; the wide lexical range creates a sort of airy, unresolved bounce between contexts. The use of the diminutive (often an endearment) is playful, denoting an affectionate intimacy with Lee-Ann, but it also diminishes the significance of the partner, clearly a negligible quantity, to allow the focus to remain firmly on Lee-Ann herself (whoever the hell she is). More than this, the language (and multiple exclamation points) contributes to the mere fact of the billboard to suggest, on the "man bites dog" principle, that it's somehow outrageous for Lee-Ann (whoever the hell she is) to snog a boy: I was left with a vague suspicion that she's actually a lesbian. Alternatively, the "boytjie" bit could also imply that she's an older woman shamelessly grabbing a much younger man.

A quick google, of course, absolutely deflates this lovely tension and implication: Lee-Ann is presumably Lee-Ann Liebenberg, a fairly minor South African model/celebrity, and she's found a new boyfriend indecently quickly after a break-up. This is one of those stories where the subject matter is infinitely less interesting than the linguistic play in its headline. Sigh.

In other news, have found the solution to Supernatural freaking me the hell out. Knitting. Another twelve rows on the Ravenclaw scarf while flinching away from ghosts, demons and hellhounds. Still a Sam girl, but Dean is growing on me.

There's a series of noticeboards in a Groote Schuur corridor with heading labels which read, from left to right, "NEHAWU NUPSAW DENOSA PAWUSA HOSPERSA PSA". This is clearly an infernal incantation of some sort; it's obviously in an alien tongue, and has a definite rhythm to it. Chant it seventeen times in the presence of black candles, African garlic and a goat, and you'll summon something horrible. Probably Manto. In her true form. The one with the tentacles.

In other news, kiddies respond to the Beatles. This is terrifyingly cute, and in tone not unrelated to the Tiny Art Director.

I had a whole long District 9 response written but I seem to have lost it. Well, phooey. I don't think this film wants me to review it. I may reconstruct it this afternoon in between excursions to the fifth circle of Hell, aka board schedules.

I do not believe that I just drove past a Daily Voice billboard imploring "CHICKEN! SAVE US FROM EVIL!" I must surely have misread it, as a result of having no brain. Not even the Daily Voice could be that weird. Screaming headlines about the dubious gender of the most recent World Record athlete notwithstanding.

The no brain is probably attributable to the rather disturbed night I had, on account of ongoing dreams that there was a spider on my headboard. A fat, fluffy spider rather like a pompom with legs. The size of my palm. Bright red.¹ Glaring at me and shooting me at intervals with its zappy laser eyes. It is not conducive to rest to be continually wriggling somnambulistically to dodge arachnoid-oculo-laser bolts, or bumbling vaguely around the bedroom in search of something to squash it with. I feel a bit frayed.

In other weird news, I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Century of the Fruitbat. I have a new cellphone, enabling me to discover that my touching belief in the poor cellphone reception in my office is in fact erroneous: it's perfectly fine with the new phone. Clearly the old phone was given to reluctance and dilettante fainting fits. The recent airtime fail caused me to grit my teeth and sign up for the cheapest possible contract, which still gives me twice as much airtime as I'll use, and a phone which can actually receive pictures, fancy-schmancy SMS formats and, possibly, radio waves from Mars. The era of blank SMS messages is over! It also has a camera, which I'll try out as soon as I work out which way to point it, and ring tones capable of soothing chimes rather than plangent beeping. I'm a bit scared of it, frankly.

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¹ In retrospect, I think it may have been a Chuzzle.

Today's Daily Sun billboard reads:

BEDROOM IS ENERGY BOX!

Possible interpretations (and I'm not sure why I think of the smutty ones first. Blame the rigours of curriculum advice):

1. Couple has sex in cruel booby-trap bedroom with hidden wiring, is electrified.
   
2. Couple has wild tantric sex in pentagram, provides electricity for entire house.
   
3. Couple remove roof from bedroom, lie naked on bed, soak up rays, photosynthesise.
   
4. Ghostbuster widget with flashing lights and extendible ears goes wild at very high occult readings in bedroom. (I watched Ghostbusters again last night, can you tell? Had forgotten how pleasingly silly it is. Also, how good the cast).
   
5. Families huddle together for warmth under giant duvets. Which is odd, as Cape Town is currently suspiciously warm, with berg winds.

Owing to unfavourable cosmic wossnames I was on the curriculum advice tables from 8.45am to 4.15pm yesterday, with one 20-minute break for lunch, while magpie, Möbius trails of students stretched down the stairs. This necessitated staggering home and vegging in front of Ghostbusters in default of actual brain, which worked surprisingly well. Today I rinse, repeat, only this time with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Clearly the first week of term causes me to retreat into 80s nostalgia. I also have Weird Science and The Breakfast Club in reserve.

I have no brain from curriculum advice, so therefore am wimping out on a Random Ginormous Fantasy Epic for today. Instead I request witterers to ritually reflect for a few minutes on the manifest iniquities of Stephen Donaldson. Any particularly pithy insults can be left in the comments, where they will improve my day enormously.

Apparently the one actual sales assistant in Telkom who is cheerful, friendly, knowledgeable, efficient and empathetic continues to be so, since he unlocked international calls within twenty minutes of me sending him a narked email, and without me having to go into the store as the UnHelpLine insisted was necessary. He also apologised. I think the FSM just touched me with his noodly appendage. Or maybe the shivery thrills are my 'flu talking, which it's doing quite loudly this morning, in an aggressive monotone.

The Daily Voice seems to have abandoned billboard poetry for the nonce, allowing my roving analytical eye to alight instead on the Sun, another noxious little tabloid, which today is evincing an interesting pattern of what I can only describe as Sudden Ellipsoid Reversal. To wit:
HER DADDY LOVED HER ... TO DEATH!
MOTHER THROWS BABY ... TO SAFETY!
Glossing right over the probably squicky circumstances of the first instance, I rather enjoy the way these headlines hoik you up, leave you dangling for an instant and then plunge you sharply into the the absolutely antithetical situation. Bonus points for breathless emphasis and narrative tension.

There's a small pile of Vital Admin on my desk, including at least one Extremely Difficult student who has thoroughly colonised my goat by mailing me daily to demand why I haven't sorted his life out yet. Once I have processed these, I'm going home. Because my 'flu demands it, and I'm feeling obedient. Also, crap.

Trust the Daily Voice to respond to the current swineflu crisis in the perfect tabloid idiom:

HORROR OF EVIL CHICKEN!!

Says it all, really.

I have my car back (the oil pressure gauge, ironically enough, had sprung a leak, which, since the gauge is positioned at the point of highest oil pressure, basically spewed all the oil out more or less instantaneously. Engine, fortunately, undamaged owing to driver paranoia). I had a horrible day in which I was so flat-out I flat-out forgot to eat. Tomorrow will be better. (She says, in tones of low menace).

Some bastard is fiddling with the Dread Sigil Odegra again in Cape Town at the moment - traffic last night was unspeakable, Rondebosch was almost gridlocked from about 4.30 to after 6.30, which is the time I gave up trying to get over to Hout Bay to visit my dad. I figured that if it had taken me 35 minutes to fail to leave Rondebosch, the rest of it was pretty much doomed. It wasn't much fun this morning, either, 40 mins up to campus, only to find the network down. I think the Cosmic Wossnames are prodding me with sticks, and snerkling nastily as I get all twitchy without my daily blogs.

On the upside, the Department of Crazed Tabloid Surrealism is fully operational. Today's gem: MY EVIL GOAT LOVE CURSE! In true billboard headline fashion the words ramify into a host of possible meanings, leaving one unsure if the unfortunate speaker is evilly cursed to love goats, cursed in love by an evil goat, or has a nice line in expletives (I have to say, I'm having the kind of day which does, in fact, inspire me to mutter "Evil goat love!" under my breath at intervals).

On the further upside, three-day weekend, with various pleasing social wossnames lined up including, after a gap of years, Mythos! It is remotely possible that I may not actually bite any more student heads off on Tuesday, although I plan to keep "Evil goat love!" in reserve just in case.

Clay Shirky is an interesting man. This discussion notes the fascinating parallel between the effects of the printing press on the Church's monopoly of religion, and the effects of the internet on newspapers' monopoly of news. DRM and other horrors are in fact quasi-religious panic, an attempt to remove power and knowledge from the hands of the people on the grounds not that it isn't good for them, but that it threatens your control. I'd be happier about this if it weren't for the fact that there are still die-hard pockets of religious fundamentalism insisting on the Bible as absolute received Word of God in the face of all its contradictions, five hundred years after the invention of the printing press allowed non-priests to see such contradictions for themselves. This suggests a likely scenario in which fundamentalist groups of the dying breed of copyright lawyers infest the twenty-sixth century with apocalyptic on-line demonstrations, to the derision of educated beholders. Like the fundamentalists using their access to the Bible to protest the dissolution of its monolithic truth, future copyright-protestors won't be able to help using the medium of their downfall to protest its existence. We can haz irony. Yay.

And while we're on the subject of newspapers, in the Department of Billboard Poetry: VILLAGE EATS GREEDY GIANT! This is an absolutely beautiful re-statement, in a fairy-tale vein, of the classic man-bites-dog trope. I cannot for the life of me imagine the actual, real-world context, except that vague visions of righteous revenge on hungry cannibal pumpkins are drifting through my head...

Fortunately, Jawas appear to have left the house relatively unscathed. Possibly they were very small, discreet Jawas. I did, however, have an icky start to the day in discovering that the rubbish bin was a squirming, writhing mass of maggots (sorry, schedule5), causing me much swearing, splashing around of disinfectant and stomping around with my skirts kited up to my waist. The way the grubs ooze blindly off in all directions when you disturb them... eeeeuw. My skin is still crawling. Bloody hot weather.

Apart from the rot at the heart of society, another Baudrillardian moment, sigh. The local billboards in the last two days have vouchsafed us the headlines "SNAKES ON THE PLAIN" (presumably outbreaks of interest to herpetologists in the low-income suburb of Mitchell's Plain) and "SHAKES ON A PLANE" (engines on cut-price domestic airline flight burst into flame mid-air, causing trepidation in passengers). This worrying trend demonstrates The Triumph Of The Title in a sense quite apart from headline smartarsery. It doesn't matter what that completely ridiculous movie was actually like, its title is now embedded in our cultural zeitgeist. More than that, its meaning and currency are entirely in its label. The surface tells you everything you need to know about the content to the extent where it is the content. It remains to be seen whether 2009's claim to the Snakes slot is as transparently substanceless. It's called Lesbian Vampire Killers. I think its inherent ambiguity flaws it, personally.