God personally awards ManU with win over Arsenal

Thousands of Manchester United fans took to the streets in celebration last weekend, after God took time out of his busy schedule of ignoring starvation, racial discrimination, poverty and war to give the Red Devils a clean 4 - 0 win against rivals Arsenal.

According to the best-selling author and divine creator, he was ignoring a three-year-old paraplegic and blind wheelchair-bound boy's cry for help when he decided to get involved in the hotly-contested and "far more important" 90 minute period of a bunch of millionaires kicking a plastic sphere of air around a patch of grass.

"St Peter and Jesus and I were kicking it in my pearly crib, when J-C said that Christianity has been getting a really bad rap these days. We spoke about how best to make an impact, you know, really reconnect with our fanbase. We could have solved hunger or saved a dying baby or something, but no one posts about that shit on Facebook and Twitter every day. It's just not popular," said the divine being of unknowable age.

Then Jesus remembered how football was, like, everywhere: in slow motion replays, dedicated sports channels and packed bars.

"It's basically its own religion," said Our Lord and Saviour. "It quickly became apparent that we could look really good by doing something that takes really no effort at all. I mean, I once fed thousands of people with just a few fish and a loaf of bread. I think I can put a plastic ball into a net. Come on."

The Almighty and Heavenly Father's religion, Christianity, is now the second-most popular in England (home of Premier League Football), with almost 23 followers.

The miraculous four last-minute goals mark one of the Holy Father's most widely praised miracles in almost 2000 years. Religious and political analysts have since been debating the divine appearance in great depth.

Other critics have, however, defended the Holy Father's decision, saying that it was a fresh new take on world problems.

"We see pictures of starving children with distended bellies and sawn-off or blown-off limbs everyday," said media analyst Mizrep Risent. "It's just getting stale. So when we saw pictures in the paper of a young boy in a football stadium with that wonderful smile on his face, shining tears of joy streaking his face after his Football team had scored a point, I immediately felt the old heart strings tug. It's a bold new take on an age-old problem."

However, some have critisised the miracle, saying that the match had been looking pretty much dead even up until the intervention.

"In terms of miraculousness, it was about a 4 out of 10," said Cardinal Archie Bishup, "and so it falls somewhere between a plague of frogs and a turning water to wine. Man-U has had a great season, and so some say that they didn't really need the extra help. Hell, they're already ahead on the log. It would have been impressive if it had been 4 - 0 to Everton."

Arsenal fans and players alike have since expressed their displeasure at God's action, saying that they, too, prayed for victory. Notable examples include ex-defender and current multimillionaire Hover Payd."I would like to blame God for the loss," he said. "Without, him, we might have actually won. Thanks a lot. Now all I have is my incredible pile of money to wallow inconsolably in for the rest of the day. You know how many strippers and cocaine i'm going to have to go through to recover from this?"

God, however, personally defended his actions, saying that there was a "special place reserved in hell" for those "festering rectal sores" who support anyone else.

"Every time I see a player from any other team putting his hands together and looking up, or kissing the silver cross around their neck, or genuflecting after scoring a goal, it gets my tits in a twist," he said, snapping a vuvuzela in two. "Obviously it's not me - why would I rob the Devils by having some fancy-haired idiot from another team scoring against us? It just makes no sense."

Longevity, healthy lifestyle potentially fatal – study

The news got scarier and the world a considerably more bleak, depressing place to live this morning, after doctors working in conjunction with medical researchers at the Institute for The Study of Dangerous and Inevitable Illnesses announced yet another way you are probably going to die.

“The first few symptoms of this disease are iniquitous and dangerous because you feel normal, like a normal, healthy sixty-to-seventy-year-old,” said Dr Koff Formiplese. “And then BOOM: you’ve got it.”

The so-called Old Age Syndrome (OAS) has been shown to affect nearly one in a thousand people, mostly senior citizens between the ages of 60 and 90. The disease has a mortality rate of 100%, and is likely to affect you or someone you know at least once in your or his or her lifetime.

“This rare medical condition has diverse and wide-ranging symptoms,” said Formiplese, “such as hair loss, flaccid and weathered skin, brittle bones, arthritis and an increased susceptibility to infection from cuts and bruises. Also, it massively degrades their driving skills, and makes them give really strange birthday presents to people. The people who have this disease carry an unacceptably elevated risk of dying and they have a much higher than ordinary chance of developing cancers, lung, bone and liver diseases, and usually have a much poorer immune system. We need to find out what is causing this terrible affliction and end it once and for all.”

To deal with the disease, many people now resort to lumping all the infected into one huge Hospice Village, where activities like tennis, water aerobics and increasingly infrequent family visits are used to provide some relief from the condition.

However, there is a silver lining.

“Though everyone who catches the disease eventually and inevitably dies, many of them live for a very long time with the disease,” said Formiplese. “You could say it’s a manageable condition. And many studies show that simply smoking a few packs of cigarettes a day, taking high doses of illegal narcotics, avoiding the gym, eating deep-fried butter... these are all proved methods for guaranteeing you don't catch OAS.”

In light of many diagnoses like these by healthcare specialists, lawyers and legal representatives now believe they have identified two of the most leading causes of OAS, and are now gathering cases and names to back up what is set to be one of the largest a class action lawsuits in the history of the world, eclipsing the comparatively meagre settlements won from tobacco giants and poisoned water suppliers.

“We now know that statistically if you spend time in a gym or in the vegetable section of a supermarket, you’re more likely to develop symptoms,” said legal professional Claus Akshin. “as such, we’re preparing litigation against the Health Industry – places like Virgin Active and other gyms – and against fruit producers, farmers and grocers who stock produce that is dangerously high in vitamins, minerals and fibre, all of which are proven to directly contribute towards OAS.”

He went on to say how these insidious farmers were exacerbating and already out-of-control problem.

“There’s apparently a greenish sticky thing called celery that actually has a negative calorie count,” said a legal expert. “What kind of sick bastard would force his clients to burn energy to eat his food?”

They are also considering the Home Shopping Network and other infomercial channels, but proving causation will be tough if not impossible.

“They say ‘Guaranteed Results’ and ‘Money-back Guarantee’ and stuff like ‘get the abs you always wanted in no time’ but we can’t really find a single example where these products have actually inflicted one of our unfortunate victims with the kinds of Body and Muscle Mass changes that indicate the onset of OAS.”

However, Virgin Active CEO and farmers everywhere have been staunchly defensive.

“We’ll defend ourselves to the last,” said Virgin Active CEO Richard Branson. “I’m not even sure if the research is sound: in fact, most of the people who come to our gyms don’t end up being healthy and ripped anyway. Hell, the largest percentage of our subscribers is Guilty New Year’s Resolution folk, and they all quit almost immediately after Day One.”

Farmers, too, have defended their actions.

“Eating our produce might bring you OAS, sure,” said murder carrots and grim reaper corn grower Moor Talitie, “But eating alternative foods – fatty foods and carbohydrates – is clinically proven to give you higher cholesterol, excess adipose tissue and heart conditions: what doctors are now calling Fat Fuck Syndrome. I mean, I know it’s choosing between two evils, but ours is definitely the lesser of the two.”

Russian hard diplomacy could threaten illegal downloads, mail order brides – America Political Analysts

Thousands of anxious Americans packed the streets across the state capital this morning in an act of widespread protest against hard-ball diplomacy against Russian leaders, after Political Analysts realised how this kind of foreign diplomacy could influence their ability to illegally download the latest episode of Game of Thrones or order a wife over the internet.

“We’re all worried,” said local placard-waver John Wilken. “This move by our government has us all worried about far-reaching political and social repercussions, like how I’m supposed to get my next fix of medieval porn-drama-fantasy that is filled with absurd amounts of characters, strange made-up languages and full-frontal nudity.”

He added that “I just really need to know when that piece of shit Joffrey is going to die. I’m not an HBO subscriber, and if Obama’s policies cut me off… well, I don’t know what I’ll do. Lose my mind and shoot up a school most likely. At least it’s still easy to buy a gun, Praise Jesus.”

However, protesters said that these worries were “among the most trivial and smallest”.

“The real issue here isn’t as flippant as downloading HBO episodes of fantasy dark-ages political murder porn,” said protest organiser Jerry Halfords, “but rather about what is going to happen in the new season of Suits, or Homeland.”

Political experts have agreed that the protest’s worries are valid.

“Most seeders and film-rippers and camcord owners are Russian,” said Head of the Department of Politics at Rhodes Unversity Dr Mally Satthews. “Just think how this will affect the supply of hot, sex-hungry young brides, or people to screw with on public DOTA 2 servers? If relations between these two powerhouses – East and West - become any more tense, Americans might be forced to marry each other, or yell hateful diatribes about being ‘Feeder noobs’ at Spanish or Chinese people.”

The international Russian Brides industry, which is reportedly worth over four billion dollars globally, has in the past taken massive knocks due to internet paranoia, and industry experts are now worried that the trade might be stopped entirely.

"Last year bride suppliers in Russia reported stunning financial losses," said Industry analyst and Economics lecturer Prof Eits Ahndloss. "If the same happens this year, we might see a future where women aren't shipped around the world and sold like animals into church-sanctioned indentured servitude. God forbid that dark day should come."

In spite of all this, Obama remained steadfast in his attitude toward the “commie pricks”.

“I urge all Americans to support me and your country in this endeavour,” he said, before adding that if you wanted to know what’s going to happen in GOT, you should just read the book or something.

"I mean, would paying for a song in the iTunes store every once in a while really kill you?”

Peace, security would “cripple” South African economy

Economic and financial experts have today blasted various religious and political parties’ calls for “peace and non-violence between South Africans and an end to rampant theft, rape and murder rates”, saying that such an outcome would “utterly devastate” the South African economy.

“South Africa does have massive multi-million rand industries like agriculture and mining to buff up its GDP,” said Editor of The Financial Times magazine Ray Zintaxes, “but our biggest industry by far is the multi-billion-rand-a-year industry centred mostly on paranoid white people and combating crime. Without crime, our economy would fall to shambles.”

Many other experts and politicians have agreed with this assessment, saying that the calls for peace and safety for all in South Africa are “too rash, too hasty [and] totally short sighted.”

“If we look at projects like Nkandla, you can easily see how the economy would be affected,” said ANC spokesperson, Chi Fwip. “If Zuma didn’t fear for his life and safety, hundreds of security contractors, many of them my personal friends and family, would be homeless, broke, unemployed and destitute. We need crime now more than ever.”

Fwip added that without the constant fear of murder, rape, robbery, assault, farm killings, mugging, gang violence, grand theft auto and petty larceny, many thousands of South Africans would immediately lose their jobs as policemen, car guards, security guards, night-watchmen, private security company employees and security installation and maintenance professionals.

“It would decimate employment,” said Fwip. “And since ‘decimate’ means ‘to reduce by a tenth’ it would probably decimate it more than once.”

Fwip added that crime was the only source of income for many poor families and crack addicts in South Africa.

“Without crime, we’re taking away their only form of livelihood,” he said. “Every time a robber breaks into a house and stabs or shoots someone, he is creating employment and wealth not just for himself, but also for police officers, doctors, hospitals, funeral directors and grave diggers. You can see how such a call would create a domino-effect of havoc for our economy.”

This not the first bit of controversy to be raised about South African crime, however, as our Police Services, the SAPS, have been criticised and questioned time and time again, with theorists alternately saying South Africa would be a better place without them or defending the SAPS as “misrepresented by a biased, unfair media”.

Academics are now calling for more “thought and discourse” on the issue before making such rash calls.

“This whole problem is more complex than merely ‘oh, please stop raping and killing and stealing’,” said Securityologist at the Beijing University School of Security Studies, Shu Tsatukyl. “Without crime, there would be no police, and without Police around there would be no one left around to stop criminals. It would be hell. Like a South African Catch-22, but with fewer long words.”

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.

Son developing nicely into entitled bigot

According to South African parents André and Jannita du Plessis, legal guardians of five-year-old Michael du Plessis, their son is “well on track” to becoming a privileged, entitled little shit with tendencies for casual racism and sexism.

“We’ve been working hard at this for a while now, and so it’s nice to see it all starting to pay off,” they said to gathered press this morning after young Michael said his first bad words about the ANC.

“He called them a bunch of corrupt thieves and liars, and then added that the blerrie country was going to hell,” they said with beaming smiles. “Usually, we have to tell him what to think and what political views to hold, but this he came up with all by himself!”

However, his parents said that they only became aware of the full extent of his progression into a fine young man who thinks the world owes him a favour and that his particular hubristic worldview is unassailable when he pulled out an empty beer can and a pair of braai tongs at breakfast yesterday and asked them, “can I tell you what’s wrong with this blerrie country?”

“Ever since his first words – ‘dada’ and ‘vok die ANC’ – we’ve known he was a natural,” they said, “but this was the cherry on the cake. Or rather, the ’blerrie’ on the hate.”

Since the announcement, his parents say they have ramped up their program to include sexism and homophobia.

“The other day we overheard him telling a friend to stop being such a faggot. When we hear him using such language, we immediately brought him an xBox, the latest Call of Duty game, a chat headset and uncapped high-speed ADSL internet. He now spends almost three hours a day belittling other kids his age and calling their sexuality into question after giving them a thorough teabagging.”

Michael is a natural, apparently, and is now taking his own initiative in his education.

“We were talking to a couple of his friends and they told us that he claims to have had sexual relations with half of their sisters and mothers, which is a nice touch that we didn’t even think about.”

And in related news, the Du Plessis’s daughter Chanté is also making her own rapid progress in becoming a lovely little sex object, with no real opinion, dreams, desires or ambition in life but to be a “nice piece of ass”.

“We make her watch at least eight hours of television a day, with enriching, empowering shows to further her growth, said her parents, “like Real Housewives of Orange Country, Geordie Shore and Mob Wives. Before you know it, we’ll be starring alongside her in our own episode of 16 and Pregnant.

Celebrities unite to raise 0.00001% of their net worth for charity

pic: wikimedia commons

Non-government charity organisations like OxFam and AfriCare have a new contender to deal with in the Save Africa campaign, after dozens of celebrities, signers, actors and politicians combined forces in a super-fund-raiser concert series aimed at raising up to one ten thousandth of a percent of their overall combined worth for African Aid Organisations and charities.

“This is big,” said coordinator of the fund-raising initiative, Bono. “We expect to raise in charity donations almost as much as what we spend in a year on cars and clothes. Every year we make tens of billions of dollars, so it’s just nice to be able to host a concert and make our fans give us almost a fraction of a minute shard of our net worth in ticket sales to give to starving Africans.”

Stars like Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Madonna and Lady Gaga will take to stages across America all throughout this week to raise awareness and millions of dollars, with a portion of that awareness and money going not just to their latest albums but also to a variety of charities.

“I’m just so glad I can do my part,” said amateur wrecking ball operator and pioneer of twerking for white people, Miley Cyrus. “Africa and these kinds of charities have been a huge part of my message and so close to my heart, ever since I learnt where Africa was and also that it isn’t a country nearly two years ago.”

Not all stars, however, were so pleased.

"Those mooching fucks in Somalia have never come to one of my concerts," said voice of our generation Kanye West, "why should I come to their help?"

Even some African citizens have stressed their displeasure.

"Two of our biggest industries are getting lots of money from guilty Europeans and Americans, and all the thousands of dollars we earn making teary-eyed poverty-porn commercials involving distended bellies and crying mothers that we produce for foreign aid companies," said Minister of Film in Southern Sudan, May Kafylm. "If these celebrities solve hunger and poverty, we will actively destroying the only source of income for tens of thousands of families across the Drought Belt."

In any case, in light of these announcements, dozens of recording studios and production companies have announced their unequivocal support of the concerts, saying that they were a wonderful opportunity to raise money for sad-looking black people on TV.

“We care a lot about African countries like Mozambia and Zimbalawi,” they said. “Some people might think that these concerts are just another opportunity to try and humanise our stars who barely even live on this planet or know what a normal life is like, or make them seem more loveable, caring and humane than they really in the eyes of crowds of mindless fans who idolise their every fart, but it isn’t. This is about charity. And giving. And a bunch of other nice-sounding words.”

However, many thousands of starving Africans have reported their happiness after some stars announced that they would be airlifting crates of their latest In Concert DVDS and albums into their countries.

“I love stars and rappers and their struggle songs, like with Drake and his ‘started at the bottom now we here’,” said one Ethiopian man. “Some of these stars lived with a dollar a day in their pockets, maybe eating out of bins and sleeping on concrete, having to go to performance venues night after night to perform and earn a name for themselves. Someday, I wish my children will live in such extreme wealth and leisure like that. Imagine that, actually eating – and out of an American bin!”

GuitarHero World Number One still sucks at guitar

Despite spending hundreds of hours on his plinky-plonky plastic GuitarHero guitar and winning dozens of international competitions across the globe, 22-year-old Eric Layla told reporters this morning that he is still terrible at “normal guitar”.

“I get a perfect 300-note streak time and time again,” he said, holding an old Taylor guitar out of which he could not coax even a shabby Wonderwall, that crappy beginner-guitarist’s bread and butter. “I get Ultra Perfect scores, even on Master difficultly, and I can destroy even the third piano solo on The Beatle’s Here Comes the Sun. It makes no sense. I should be at least as good as Angus Young by now.”

He said that while the Ten-Thousand-Hour rule had proven successful for many other video game addicts, it did not seem to be working at all for him.

“Violent video games make you violent, and all the people that play these turn into brutal cold killers with 100% accuracy on the gun range – so why can’t I shred like a boss yet? I mean, I can hit over 893 000 points on Smoke on the Water, and I can’t even do a barre chord yet,” he said. “You know, whatever ‘barre chord’ means.”

Scientists have since looked into this complaint.

“We have done science and chemicals and graphs over this problem, and I think we have found the solution,” said lead researcher Tess Tubes. “You see, where games like DJ Hero allow for the fully real and visceral experience of plugging in a flashstick, pressing play, and then touching buttons and turning dials that do nothing for three hours, GuitarHero is a little different.”

The problem, she said, lies with the instrument.

“What we need,” she said, “is a GuitarHero controller that has not just five buttons with different colours, but instead six rows of buttons with 22 columns. For a fully real experience, he should up the difficultly rating past Master all the way to Real Life.”

Artist's impression of what the all-new Future controller
might look like

Creators of the game have since said that they have taken heed of these complaints, saying they were coming up with a new game that more accurately represented the instrument.

“We just have some legal hurdles to vault,” they said in a statement yesterday, “but already we are working on GuitarHero: Real Life.”

The game, they said, would have a number of different modes.

“Practice Mode is set in the lifelike setting of your room, where you spend hours stumbling and fumbling away on one particular chord progression,” they said. “Once you have mastered this early campaign, you move onto Shitty Gig Mode, where you will cope with terrible equipment, a drunk, uninterested crowd, and a guy who keeps coming up to the mic and asking you to play songs you don’t know.”

However, at this stage the game is all in an early development phase.

“We have a whole lot of ideas – like towards the end of Shitty Gig Mode, we might have ‘Friends Asking You To Play At Their Society's Event For Free Mode’, and maybe a ‘Your First ‘Real’ Gig In A City, Which Only Your Sisters And Mom Come To Mode’. Like we said, it’s all in the early stages, but as you can see, when it comes out, it’ll be like you’re actually playing a real guitar.”

Teenage boy unsure whether to use smiley, heart emoticon

pic: wikimedia commons

Following Friday night’s message from 14-year-old Jane Hadley to 15-year-old Eric Carlson containing not one but two winking smileys, a hug emoticon and a colon and capital ‘D’ combined to make a grinning text face, the young boy is reportedly unsure how to respond, saying there isn’t a smiley or textual emoticon that fits neatly into the category of appropriate responses.

“We’ve been texting for a while now, and she sent me two x’s the other day, so it’s safe to say that things are getting pretty serious,” he said, gesturing to his Blackberry. “But I can’t use a single x, because we’re past that stage, and even the double x is getting a little stale. I just don’t know what to do.”

According to Carlson, a whole range of usual responses is now unsuitable.

“I can’t send her three x’s, because that might be too forward – you know, a little raunchy? – and if I send back a heart emoticon with a wink and a smile she might read into it too much,” he said. “Usually I would just type out a laugh, you know, ‘hahahahaha’ and then send a winking smiley or two back, but I really want this single instant message to make an impact, a real lasting impression, on her.”

Media Message experts have agreed that the young boy is in quite a conundrum, as moving forward into three x’s, or even a combination of ‘x’s and ‘o’s, is “a definitely too saucy”, and that “most normal smileys available to him are too benign and friendly to convey his true feelings about her”.

“As text smileys stand right now, he’s in a difficult spot,” said Reed Zintouet. “How can he tell the girl how he really feels, what he honestly thinks about her, if all he has are smileys that convey a very limited set of emotions?”

Sources close to the teenage boy now report that he is considering what could almost be proper spelling and grammar to show how much he cares for Jane.

“We looked at his phone the other day and saw that he is now using ‘yuo’ instead of ‘u’ and stuff like ‘too’ and ‘to’ and whole words instead of a garble of vowel-less bastard words,” they said to reporters.

Analysts now estimate Eric to be only four and a half months away from actually talking to Jane, and a mere eight months before they have a full conversation.

“If he keeps at this break-neck pace, they’ll be holding hands before his 17th birthday.”

However, there still is no reliable guess as to when they might one day have sex, as queries to this effect were met with stifled giggles and outbursts of laughter when we mentioned the word ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’.

“He said it again!” said Eric’s friend, Jake. “Hahahahaha, ’penis’!”

South Africans excited for their one day they can afford at Arts fest

South Africans across the country have expressed their unmitigated excitement this morning, saying they cannot wait to travel halfway across the country to enjoy the one day that can spend at this year’s National Festival of the Arts without declaring bankruptcy.

“I’m very excited,” said one Johannesburg resident. “There are hundreds of shows, dozens of food stalls, and a whole range of different clothing stores and other outlets selling stuff that is quite blatantly overpriced. I’m having difficulty deciding which three things I can afford to do.”

Much fervour and hype has met this year’s Festival, with many leading art critics saying that this one is going to be “the fucking weirdest one yet.”

“We know that in the past we’ve had guys in glass boxes sweating blue paint while music plays in the background, and we’ve had contemporary interpretive dance pieces that make you think ‘okay, what the fuck did I just watch?’," said a critic working at Art Times magazine. "Not to mention we've seen in the past a whole bunch of higher-concept plays and theatrical performances that went right over your head, after which you had to pretend to have understood their underlying postmodern and postcolonial thematic bases and socioeconomic critique to not look like a moron in front of your educated friends - but this year is set to make all of that look like a bunch of Leon Schuster films.”

Grahamstown and her inhabitants are now up in a flurry of preparations to get everything ready for the yearly fun and festivity of the NFA.

“I’ve filled up all my bottles and water tanks at the spring, I’ve bought candles and petrol for my generator for when the power goes out, and I’ve made sure I have enough basic foodstuffs in the fridge and pantry before Pick ‘n Pay invariably ups the price of bread, milk and other necessities by 28% each,” said one Grahamstonian who has also moved out of her own bedroom to rent it out to strangers so that she can afford to eat during the NAF week.

“I think everything is ready for just another typical festival week.”