The news that steals your bank details

Swing low

A little tired of Trump, Vance and Musk? We have just the thing for you – a rugby test against England! We can no longer remember why, but England have about five good reasons to take revenge on the Springboks. Bring it on!

Spaced out on the chess board

South Africa's first cannabis chess tournament, the Green Knights Chess Tournament, will take place tomorrow (Saturday, November 16) at the Cheeba Cannabis Hub in Eden Park, Johannesburg. According to the organisers, Cheeba Cannabis Academy, the aim is to combine the relaxing qualities of cannabis with the intellectual challenge of chess.

According to “passionate chess coach" Morongwa Rasesemola, players on any level are welcome. She says it's about more than mere competition, it's about “building a community, where strategic thinking, creativity and health are important". It is unknown if the holy smoke is a requirement to participate.

Another Trump term. It’s sinking in

The Democrats and the entire left wing of American politics have not been in such a depressed state for a long time. But they will have to get through the self-pity phase because the threat is huge. Humour is always a good start.

The new Musk, and how that happened

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have just been appointed by Donald Trump as heads of his new department of government efficiency. Trump said it would “shred government bureaucracies, remove redundant regulations, cut wasteful spending and restructure federal agencies".

Musk, for his part, said: “This is going to send shock waves through the system and anyone involved in wasting resources, and there are a lot of them.”

Here's a short documentary that looks at the tumultuous rise of Elon Musk in politics. It was made by British activists Led By Donkeys but is still reliable in terms of fact.

Six political cartoons of the Week

Lekker old advertisement!

Cellphones were such an exciting new development in the world ...

Some more funnies ...

A house in Bedfordview, Gauteng, which is supposed to resemble the Titanic passenger ship, will be auctioned on November 21, if the owner's reserve price is reached. The three-storey house, with its own 15 m high lighthouse, has been on the market before for R40 million.

The owner, a successful entrepreneur who wishes to remain anonymous, is also the designer of the house, but not an architect. The house has gross nautical features such as portholes for some of the windows, a suspension bridge between two sections, an ocean-themed café and a 60-seat dining room/restaurant as well as a deconstructed shipwreck in manufactured stone, which surrounds one of the four swimming pools on the property. It also has a giant water slide made of manufactured stone, reminiscent of the style of Sun City's Lost City.

The house has 10 bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a billiards room, a nine-hole mini golf course, a cigar lounge, a mini soccer field and a nightclub venue complete with turntable decks, an underground cellar and two jacuzzis. The owner says it was his fantasy home he escaped to in the evening from Gangsters Paradise ...

Actually, it’s ...

Do you have friends who sometimes use an expression incorrectly? Should one tell them? One of my friends refers to an intriguing detective story as a “whosedunnit". (It's whodunnit.) Arghhhh ...

Nice gesture from the Scots at a Springbok practice session.

Old, but far from cold

* The story about the cuckoo clock comes from Orson Welles' movie The Third Man when the main character Harry Lime argues that the peaceable Swiss have only produced the cuckoo clock, while violent Italy gave us the Renaissance and Leonardo da Vinci.

** Thing is, that was fake news: Cuckoo clocks were invented in Germany, in the Black Forest.

*** There is Roger Federer to bat for the Swiss, but he's half-South African.

**** Italy also gave us Silvio Berlusconi, that Trump capo.

♦ VWB ♦

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