Opinion: Kids these days spending too much time outdoors

Guest Writer Johan Van Eksteen is back once more, folks, with those blistering words of truth and power that move whole crowds to cheers and tears. This time, he’s stumbled upon a very disturbing modern trend that every parent should be very, very concerned about indeed.

Dear Readers, I think I’m finally getting old. This weekend, sitting at home with the curtains drawn so that the bright sun and rolling verdant pastures in front of the ocean by my summer house don’t cause a glare in my 24-inch plasma, I heard a strange, strange noise. Cracking the windows and looking – eugh – outside, I eventually managed to choke down my Gollum-esque sun-hissing long enough to see a truly shocking, disturbing sight.

Children going outside, making forts, playing games and climbing trees.

Seriously, WTF is this kak?

When I was a kid we never had such luxuries. We had to be content to sit indoors all day, staring for hours at a time at a flickering screen, our necks craning downwards into glowing screens. Hell, if I even so much as mentioned spending a few wasted minutes out in the sun and air, my parents would have given me the most massive hiding, or at least left a downvote on my Reddit post.

And yet those were special days. Who could ever forget the magic of getting your first 30 likes on one post? Which of us don’t warmly cherish all the lols and rofls we had with our family? These are the things that make childhood the magical period of innocence and wonder and reposting it is.

All this gambolling and frolicking can’t be good for you: in fact, I think it could be destroying this country’s morals. There is so much life happening in the palms of our hands, and there they all are: outside, breathing in pollen-heavy, insect-infested air in the garden. God, yesterday I had to confiscate their soccer ball and then send them to their rooms with the door locked and shades drawn just so they’d say a perfunctory ‘lol’ to the memes I posted on their walls.

Nature:  a truly revolting, dangerous wasteland brimming
with spiders, disease and all kinds of horrors.

How are you supposed to make friends without adding them online? We need to do something to stop this scourge on our children’s innocence and wonder before it kills it altogether. How will our children ever be able to cherish these special, magical moments without a selfie or status that gets 23 likes and 15 comments in just 15 minutes?

Worst yet are these insufferable books they’re constantly reading. You look up from your iPad at the dinner table and the little vacuous snots have it right on their lap – they can barely go two minutes without looking down at it. And it’s not even a goddamn Kindle; what could be so interesting about paper and ink anyway? It seems that every two seconds I’m telling my kids “geez, Frikkie and Johan Junior, put that bloody thing away”.

We need to take a stand: these balls and games and frolicking in the untouched splendour are creating a generation of hyper-active, anti-social-network loners who don’t even once take part in conversation with their friends and followers; and all the while their iPads and Gameboys and Playstation 4s and Facebook accounts gather dust, forgotten and unappreciated.

In fact, I could go one step further and say that these so-called “physical sports” are warping our kids’ brains and teaching them to be violent. Every day, after my daily stress-unwinding LAN session of ThroatSlit MurderKings 5 I sit back in creeping, overwhelming terror and think about how my kids might be outside, rugby tackling each other, stomping on each other’s’ fingers and hands in that “ruck” thing, or sitting in giant stadiums at school yelling blood-thirsty war-cries at another bunch of kids whose only difference is that they go to some other school.

I know that my own grandparents thought I was spending “too much blerrie time on that blerrie computer thing”, but this is obviously a totally different situation. If we do nothing, we stand to pay the worst price of all: we could end up with a generation of children who think that they should empathise and try to understand that their own children might have their own personal interests and passions that are vastly different to theirs.

Or – God forbid the thought – that they shouldn’t tell their kids to do something just because they did it for years on end. What kind of mad, insane world might that be?

Johan is a guest columnist at Muse and Abuse. Widely renowned for his non-nonsense approach to controversial topics, Johan shines a blinding light of truth on subjects like the hideous scourge of immigration, why white people should vote ANC, why Blackface isn't the real racist problem in SA, and how Black Privilege is an ugly truth that no one wants to admit. He also thinks gay marriage should have been outlawed years ago.

Turning topic into race, gender issue “exactly what was needed”

True progress showed itself on Facebook today, after an innocent, inoffensive status was immediately turned into a racial and gender issue.

The post, which was a harmless joke about the Springbok’s match last weekend against New Zealand, only lasted 12 minutes before being skewed and twisted out of context and proportion to become an embittered flamewar about racism and sexism in the white-supremacist-capitalist patriarchy of televised sports culture. In just one day it attracted thousands of comments and arguments from incensed online commenters.

The status’s author, Jake Hendersen, now says that he’s glad they’ve started a “conversation” around race and sexism.

“You know, when I posted my status I just wanted to poke fun at New Zealand friends about this weekend’s match and say ‘springboks r the best lol all blacks are so useless’, not knowing my awful spelling would cause a digital meltdown,” he told reporters this morning.

“But now that hundreds of people are typing out ALL-CAPS hate speech, racial slurs, ad hominem attacks and demands that the idiots on the opposing side go read a fucking book, I’m glad to see a ‘discussion’ has started. This is just the first step one a long, arduous journey to a future free of racism, gender-based hatred, and harmless humour.

The post, which now stands at 21 485 likes and 11 792 comments, has been called “just what we all needed” by Human Rights advocacy groups.

“This is how we change the world: by getting people coming together, talking, discussing, and calling each other 'total retards who haven’t even read a book in their damn lives',” said chief researcher for Rights For All, Nelson King Jr. “You know, a lot of people might say, ‘oh, Nelson, but completely misunderstanding and detracting from the simplistic comedic value of the original post and embroiling the entire internet in a foetid clusterfuck of ad hominem attacks and fallacious, shallow arguments littered with faulty logic or emotional jabs will just divide and separate us all,’ but that’s where they’re wrong,” he said.

“This is how true progress is made: by just putting everything on the table, showing our cards, and turning every internet user against each other in a horrible, embarrassing hate-thread that everyone tires of in just minutes.”

However, internet analysts now believe such a peace could be all too brief.

“People have the ability to overcome great barriers and create a better, more tolerant future of peace and prosperity devoid of casual humour,” said web expert Hilby Bloggin.

“But come on, this is the 21st century. How could there ever be lasting peace when every ten minutes we have something like Caitlyn Jenner or Cecil the Lion to hate each other over?”

Football “still definitely newsworthy” – BBC

It was a resounding victory for journalism today, after football, rugby, cricket, tennis – as well as many other sports codes including but not limited to curling, archery, bowling, darts, pool, rowing and professional tiddlywinks – were reaffirmed as “still definitely newsworthy and important journalism” by a BBC-funded study.

“For years now our screens have been filled with hundreds and thousands of hours of slow-motion replays, critical analysis and up-to-the-minute updates on everything sports-related, like match scores, financial transfers, or even who is fucking whose wife in the national team,” said a spokesperson for the BBC. “Today, we are pleased to announce that these events are still as important as ever, and deserve their hours-long slots just after international affairs and current events.”

The study has irrefutably proven that football – along with all sport – is still on par with disease, war, political scandals and the myriad other important current events that define our generation and necessitate ceaseless coverage and debate.

“Although football was first started as a social experiment in the 1960s to see how much a human being can be paid for doing as little and as inconsequential, meaningless-in-the-grand-scope-of-the-universe work as possible, it quickly blossomed into something as important as Ebola killing white people, or famine killing brown people, or war,” said the study. “Hence the dozens of channels dedicated to every goddamn fart Lionel Messi makes.”

The study has since been welcomed and applauded by leading institutes of journalism and media studies.

“People misunderstand sport,” said professor Rum Rogeny of the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies. “It’s not an opium of the people designed to distract them with irrelevant and endless arguments about who has the better team or the most trophies and titles or who beat who in the umpteenth iteration of a packet-of-air-kicking-contest between two groups of millionaires. Soccer is relevant. It's the only time God ever does anything on Earth. It’s politics but with a ball. It’s war, but with better hair and fake injuries."

In spite of mounting criticism from dissenting critical voices who steadfastly claim (in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, of course) that sport is a form of ‘soft politics’ that allows you to pretend to take part in pseudo-political arguments without any of the reprisals or repercussions of holding a real political view – much like a child walking around in his father’s oversized shoes in imaginary games of ‘play-play’ – many thousands of normal people around the world have welcomed the study.

“Football is super important,” said a man counting an imaginary list with his fingers. “It has kicking. It has passing. It has tackles – some of these tackles are illegal. Some are in a grey area. These are important debates. Debates which the news tries to distract us from with news like which country is invading which country, or new about stupid so-called ‘mass protests’ in Mexico City.”

The study also definitely ruled out the possibility of think topics, debates, art exhibitions or any kind of cultural thing as ‘news’.

“Even things like massive scientific accomplishments – like a ten-year project to land a tiny satellite on a comet one hundred million miles away – are fucking definitely not news. The thing is, how many people really understand science enough to make an opinion on it? There just isn’t any controversy around these events. How are we supposed to get ceaseless heated debates, long, angry blogposts and opinion columns, pages and pages of incensed comments defiantly touting their entrenched viewpoint, and metres of print responding not just to the story, but also responding to responses - and therefore endless pageviews and unfathomable advertising revenue – out of that boring crap? That’s why we make it more about the little things. Like sexist shirts. Now THAT is news.”

Muse and Abuse would like to invite any reader who didn't understand this to form a very angry opinion about it and write their own blog on why we're a bunch of morons.

Football fans don’t blame referee

It was first for the history books today, after thousands of Manchester United and Arsenal fans agreed that last night’s game was “totally fair” and that the referee did a “marvellous, simply excellent job” of ensuring a clean, even match.

“The game was absolutely fair and unbiased,” said one fan, Shirley Reff, who emailed us without once using her CAPSLOCK key or any exclamation marks. “I would just like to congratulate the referee on doing a great job of the overwhelming task of making sure that a soccer match is objectively controlled, fair and utterly impartial.”

Reff explained in more depth.

“Let’s take for example his offsides call at about the 32-minute mark,” she said. “Excellent! What acuity! It was quite clearly offsides, no two ways about it. And that tackle between Santi Cazorla and Ander Herrera? It was fair and clean: his foot clearly hit the ball first. The referee was right to exercise his play-on discretion.”

Pictured: Most referees

Fans now say that even when there were questionable moments replayed in slow-motion where the referee missed a call or didn’t issue a penalty, one had to be understanding.

“We can’t expect him to see everything,’ they said, quietly drinking their beers in a calm and orderly fashion while seated and not taking off their shirts or hurling abuse at the Plasma screen. “It’s a huge stadium, lots of noise, lots going on. He’s just human. We’re bigger than being childish ranting lunatics.”

Experts in the act of guys kicking around a bag of air have agreed with this reaction, saying it “only makes sense”.

“Really, if you think about the utter meaninglessness of the world and the impossibility of our existence, and the overwhelming and terrifying fact that we live in just one tiny shard of space-time, an insignificant blink in history’s eye in which we’re all definitely going to die alone and unloved one day, with all our life’s works and struggles reduced to a forgotten and trivial collection of futile acts in the face of our own inevitable mortality, then getting worked up about one missed call in one inconsequential football match just feels dumb,” said Refereeologist Blou de Vissle. “Unless we’re talking about last weekend when that fucking blind dick ref missed that totally obvious handball by Suarez right outside the goal line. I mean, how could you miss it? The useless myopic fuck.”

Archive footage proves cricket once contained sport

Fans of going to stadia to get drunk, wear colourful gear and ogle the dancing cheerleaders were left in speechless shock today, after Television Sports Channel directors announced this week their discovery of stunning proof that Cricket once actually contained elements of sport.

"It's definitely proof," said DSTV Sport Channel Director Hyle Eiyts. "We have found video evidence that proves once and for all those claims that we all found so ridiculous: that cricket once actually had scores and players and teams and stuff."

Many fans, however, are staunchly disbelieving, saying that it's impossible.

"We all know and love Cricket. The colours, the flags, the beer, the dancing chicks, cheering every once in a while because someone in the middle of the field where we all go to celebrate the festival hits a ball over the fence dividing us from the VIP members in pads and helmets. I just can't believe that such a wonderful thing would have come from a such a blatant snooze-fest."

However, sports historians say the discovery is a real eye-opener.

“Watching the footage, we finally have some idea of how exciting, how truly riveting this sport once was,” said sports footage curator and discoverer Shu-Tsin Slomo. “In fact, it was considered TOO exciting. They had to control, limit, the sport to stop people descending into mad chaos caused by the sheer adrenaline flood that inevitably stems from watching a bunch of men standing on a field of grass for hours on end while pairs of them run up and down a short stretch of dirt, every once in a while doing something you can actually see from the stands.”

Slomo outlined the changes they were forced to make to conserve the fabric of social integrity.

"The sport was so exciting, so mind-bogglingly brain-blowing that they had to shorten games to just one day instead of five days," he explained. "It was so breath-takingly intense, so life-alteringly incredible, that they had to cut the sport from 50 awe-inspiring 'overs' to just 20. It was that hectic."

Since the discovery, many historians have stepped forward with corroborating evidence, showing how these massive changes were just not enough to stop fans rioting out of sheer, psyche-destroying ecstacy.

"The changes they made were big, but not big enough," they said in a joint collaborative report. "They soon realised that this day-long drama was too dangerously moving to intense states of interest and euphoria that they had to alter it even more."

They explained in more depth.

"After television was invented, they had to limit the damage. They cut out vast tracts of the sport, showing just highlights and replays of single interesting aspects - like a hit, or a catch, or a wicket being blown out of the ground. They would water down these images with what were then frivolous distractions and add-ons: the drinking, the wild fans, the bright colours, the crying spectators, the batsman making a religious sign after hitting a ball, the dancing girls. It is from this tradition that our modern Cricket originates."

Fans who have heard about the news, however, say that the changes to Cricket will no revert anytime soon.

"The world has changed," one said. "To go back to long so-called games and these weird Five-Day-Internationals with 50 overs and multiple innings - why would we do that? That would be like reading a long, boring news story in a newspaper when you could just read the tweet online."

Readers wanting to know more about this but, like, TLDR, can just read the tweet on @WheresMattyNow.

Schools ban "racist, classist" Chess

It has been a fantastic day for equal rights, after schools around the world announced their decision to finally ban the overtly racist and classist piece of offensive intolerance disguised as a board game, Chess.

“Just look at the game,” said Headmaster of Checkerton High School, Chek Mayt, “It’s all about kings and queens forcing the poor proletariat pawns around a board, and about whites fighting blacks to control a limited bit of territory. We’re just glad we can finally throw this Nazi-esque piece of crude pro-supremacy propaganda in the bin.”

Chess, as we all know, was invented by 1623 by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who came up with the concept after realising how charred or polished bones of innocent men and women could each be carved into different little figurines for use in board games aimed at whiling away the quiet moments between public executions. Chess was preceded by the far more bigoted Backgammon (a word which derives from the Old Latin, Bacchus Gammonius, meaning “slaughter of innocents”) which involved impaling white and black pieces on different colour spikes, with the winner being the one who can get rid of their particular ethic group the fastest.

Mayt is just one of many Education professionals who stand by the new ban. He added that what made the game even more like a mini Apartheid was how some pieces, like the Bishop, are forced to always remain on their specific coloured area.

“What are we trying to teach our kids? That we are all just expendable, exploited pieces on the board of life, divided up by the colour of our skin and never allowed by society to leave our predefined roles or change our lot in life? What if a rook wants to move in an ‘L’ shape? What if a pawn wants to take a step to the side? What if a king doesn’t want to sacrifice his subjects in a pointless war that has no real purpose or reason except racial hatred and territorial disputes?”

Schools have for a number of years now been trying to slowly marginalise chess out of their hallways through covert operations, but they say that it has not yet proven successful, and that there was finally no other choice than drastic action.

“We used to pay kids to beat up the smaller kids who played this game between AP Maths and Advance Chemistry, calling them ‘nerds’ and ‘dorks’ in the hopes that they would bow to peer pressure and social norms and give up the game, but it’s still played today,” said Mayt. “Extreme measures are necessary. If we want to teach our kids tolerance and acceptance, we have to ban this game and condemn anyone who plays it.”

Some theorists are now trying to work on a “more tolerant, less ethnically charged version” of the game, but say they have encountered some difficulties.

“We first tried to fix it by changing the colours of the pieces, but even this has proven not enough. We tried yellow and red, but now it just looks like we’re trying to portray Asian and Indian ethnic cleansing.” In spite of these difficulties, these hard-working men and women say they are optimistic that they are on the verge of a “much better game”.

“We’re making a new version in which every piece is a mutli-coloured rainbow pawn – so that we’re all equal and racially sensitive – and a new bunch of rules in which your pieces democratically elect a King, and then you spend the rest of the game exercising passive measures instead of violence, equipping your pieces with placards, marijuana, flowers and an iconic soundtrack to stop the pointless violence of war. Sure, there isn’t a winner or loser, and it’s not at all fun – but isn’t that the best way to teach kids the basic lessons of life?”

The game goes on sale next week, alongside the new anti-capitalist version of a popular board game, Marx-nopoly, in which players equally distribute land and spread their Pass-Go-Collect-200-Dollars income evenly among the masses.

Bunch of men kick bag of wind into net between poles

pic: The Guardian

Thousands of people screamed in mixed frustration and celebration last weekend - much like they did in the hundreds of weekends before - after a bunch of millionaires used their feet to roll a plastic packet of air into a white nylon net suspended between two metal poles.

The group of millionaires, who all wore the same colour just with different numbers on their backs, cheered in victory for the crowd, after just narrowly stopping another bunch of same-colour-shirt wearing millionaires from doing the same thing to them on a big patch of grass in London surrounded by thousands of screaming non-millionaires.

"I know that we have had lots of exciting examples in the past of a bunch of grown men getting overpaid for what is really just toeing around an imported Chinese piece of plastic pumped up with what we breathe on a daily basis," said a 42-year-old man dressed all in red who also isn't a millionaire, "but this particular 90 minutes was exceptional. There was kicking. There was passing. There was booting. There were balls going into nets and fully grown men kissing their hands and pointing to the sky as if God was favouring them in that particular 90 minutes instead of ending world hunger or war or disease. It was brilliant - certainly nothing like the last 40 or so 90-minute ball-kicking sessions I paid to go and watch every weekend last year."

The 90 minutes - which was more like 97 minutes after the man with the whistle not kicking the ball awarded extra time for the millionaires' impressive acting skills - was not, however, without controversy, with hundreds of thousands of people in smoky bars across the world screaming their opinions at TV screens.

Pictured: fan's impression of whistle-blower

On more than one occasion, the whistle-bearer's quality of eyesight was brought into question, along with his sexuality, mental condition, and whether or not he was being unfair to a particular bunch of millionaires.

Following the success, the bunch of men will go on to play another bunch of men next week, with the hope of winning a big metal cup.

"We're going to win it again, I just know it," said another fan (who has no real connection with the bunch of millionaires and yet becomes indignantly defensive if you question their skills or qualities as a bunch of ball-kickers), before adding in a few homophobic digs at the other teams' millionaires, and making a snide remark about their track records of winning big metal cups. "Those other clubs haven't won a title in years. We're obviously better, because reasons."

Meanwhile, the head multi-millionaire in charge of the other millionaires said that he was excited about the results, and that they could not have done it without their loyal fanbase.

"I drive a very nice, very expensive car that uses a lot of fuel," said the also Men's-Cologne-and-underwear-and-sports-shoes model, who took time out of being in scandals in the tabloids to speak to gathered reporters. "Without their endless support, I wouldn't be where I was today. I'd be in a lower league, probably, making as much as a doctor or teacher makes. Christ, imagine that?"

Analysts have since confirmed that the air-bag-kickery was the most exciting thing to happen in human history since last weekend, when a bunch of yellow-shirted millionaires kicked their sack of air into a net belonging to red-and-blue-shirted millionaires.

"It certainly is a very important piece of human history," said a man who used to kick air packets and is now paid to give his opinion about kicking air packets on TV, "which is why we filmed the air-packed-kicking and will play that particular fifteen seconds of air-bag-booting in slow motion every four minutes, for the whole day. And not just on dedicated packet-kicking TV channels, no. We'll also pretend it's news and tack it on for 30 minutes after the news anchor has sufficiently depressed you with all those far-less-newsworthy stories about a couple of kidnapped girls in some African country."

Readers wanting to know more about this story can just turn to any news channel or walk into any bar.

SRC election to be decided in dance-off

In a sudden turn of events this morning the Rhodes Student Representative Council shocked the sometimes-voting student body by announcing that the usual ballot-style democratic elections for SRC portfolios would be dropped in favour of a "kiff dance competition."

According to incumbent SRC President Officer Raak Datbadhi, the move comes in hopes that "all those okes who watch Idols and Big Brother will get interested."


 
"We've seen in past Idols seasons that sometimes so many people vote that they get two winners at the end of the day," said Datbadhi. "We think that the possibility of accidentally having two presidents will be great."

The new electoral process started off with a surprising video released this weekend, in which the SRC showed off their preliminary dance moves in hopes to win a strong starting sentiment with the voting public. The video contains none of that usual democratic election crap, such as names, portfolio aims and goals, candidate manifesto, previous leadership credentials or current campaign mandate, and instead focuses on their skills on the dancefloor.

"Basically all the important stuff," said Datbadhi.

And according to Head of DanceSport and now expert in Student Politics Megan Bohlroom, this is a great way for students to pick out the right candidate.

"They all have a pretty similar, too-long marching intro, which makes it difficult to single one true leader out," said Bohlroom. "However, the spin, twist and pose of the Projects candidate shows that she is a truly gifted, natural-born leader with the kinds of skills that will really serve in the non-dance related side of the SRC's workload."

Other candidates also show promise. 

"The tall white president dude might seem a little stiff and forced at first, but it's in that final little squat that he really shows his natural gift for leading the student body."

Other candidates, however, might suffer a stunted start.

"The 'machine-gun' move of the Oppidan Councilor might be a little too politically aligned to the ANC and 'Umshini Wami' to win over students, and the fact that some of the candidates aren't wearing overalls or purple shows that they actually don't give two flying shits about students and their needs," said Bohlroom.

However, many students remain unconvinced at the show, saying that the obvious lack of Autumn Harvest in the video means that the clip is not a valid indication of their real dance potential and thus their leadership capabilities.

"I'm somewhere between Sheldon Cooper and an IS major when it comes to dancing," said second-year BFA student Ackjulie Tahlented. "But err'body knows that when i've got ma drink own, I'm half Beyonce, half Rihanna. I'm Rihyonce, biaatch!"

Students can vote over the course of the next week, during which candidates will be staging dance-offs every lunchtime at the Kaif, with surprise choreographed flash mobs at Dining Halls to be announced this week.