Autographs and pics

Some of my collection of autographs. Sorry for terrible scan quality! As a child and teenager I collected them, and am now thinking I would like to reprise this hobby. 

UPDATE!!

RICHARD KLINE!! 

Not exactly an autograph, but it MORE than counts. I wrote to Richard Kline - Larry Dallas from Three's Company - because he's in a big new show asking for an interview for my blog and got such a nice surprise to come home to this reply today. Standby for a celeb interview on my blog!!! 

"Daley" Thompson CBE (born 30 July 1958),[1] is a former decathlete from the UK. He won the decathlon gold medal at the Olympic Games in 1980 and 1984, and broke the world record for the event four times. Richard Peter Snell (born 12 September 1968 in Durban) is a former cricketer who played five Tests and 42 One Day Internationals for South Africa. He played for Transvaal in the early 90's forming a formidable opening pair with Steven Jack. He took South Africa's first Test wicket after they were re-admitted to international cricket. The event where I got their autographs was so much fun. It was a sort of obstacle course / there were 10 events where they all had to compete over two days. They were all gracious!

Agatha Christie's Birthday 15 September

Agatha Christie, to put it plainly, is a heroine of mine. It was the anniversary of her birth yesterday, and she shoulda been trending on Twitter! She wasn't, so in case you didn't know, she was an author, one of the finest crime writers of all time. She was born on 15 September 1890 and passed away on 12 January 1976.  She wrote 82 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections. She invented the hero Hercule Poirot and the heroine Miss Marple. 

She wrote a mass of stories, and I probably don't need to go into the whole list here, but in case you're keen to see it, it's here:

I think that if any author has actually spurred me on to pick up my pen and write myself, it's Agatha Christie. Her imagery, her notions of upper crust crimes in the higher echelons of British society, the luxuries of cups and tea and slices of cake and the 'below stairs' class, spiced with the solving of desperate and sometimes, for the period, quite violent, crimes has that irresistible element, but also serves as a preservation of the time and the class. I sometimes wonder at the patience of Hercule Poirot, himself at the butt end of British uppercrustery, all the while providing the solution to the mystery. 

No man is a lone ship

Hey guys! I've been a blogger since 2005, but I've only done blogging for my business. My business page is here  but more and more I've noticed myself putting posts on there which I guess aren't really related to my business. They're related to my community activism, my passions, my interests and just .... stuff. So, it occurred to me that while I'll probably still post those posts on there, at least until this blog gains momentum and followers, I need a personal blog too. LOL. So here it is, and I'm hoping that this will become a small kind of a journal, a place to put down my thoughts, a place to make friends and for you to contribute too.

I am a loner, an individual, someone who is very much an individual ship in the middle of all the ships in the ocean. I live in a big city - Johannesburg. And sometimes, when you live in a city like this and are surrounded all the time by people, places, things... you yearn for your ship to sail off into the open seas, even if just for a space. If it's not possible, for whatever reason you're not able to get away, it becomes challenging sometimes to avoid bumping into all the others. It's a complex feeling. At the same time, you may just be wanting one of these other ships to throw their line across your deck, to say "hey listen, yeah we are all ships sailing around out here, but we're not ALL out on our own mission - we see you, we care."

Things like social media, like Facebook, can be positive or negative. Positive is when it's used to make GREAT connections. It makes a whole lot of stuff more accessible. But it also makes it easier to hurt people - like put out invitations to a whole community, but make sure that the one person you don't invite is also aware of the invitation. Social media is a whole new way of life, a whole new way of social interaction that I think the world is just beginning to learn how to use. I sit on the fence, interested to see whether the world will use social media for the good that it is so very capable of, or whether it will use it to indulge the latent cruelty which seems to lie within the depths of humanity.

And saying all that I'm reminded of the lesson that I am trying to learn, the one that I am teaching myself and hope to never forget - to not take life too seriously!

Mr Bean!

RIP John Ritter 1948 - 11 Sept 2003

Something strange has happened to me. I've become a fan of someone 10 years after he passed away. I'm a stargazer. I love my celebrities. But this one's different. In the past I've always become a fan of a person in their lifetime.

I'm talking about JOHN RITTER.

I always LIKED John Ritter. But to be honest, I didn't know that much about him, I'd seen him in Problem Child and I remembered that he'd been in Three's Company. And I was sad when I heard he died, specially since we were just beginning to get into 8 Simple Rules. But while I was old enough to remember Three's Company being shown on TV, I wasn't old enough to have got any of the jokes.

Fast forward to last month when I began watching episodes of it and I instantly irrevocably became a fan of both the show and of John. I think the reason I went looking for stuff to laugh at was that I'd forgotten to laugh, forgotten to live with a bit of humour - financial constraints, health issues, living in a stressful city... it all added up to a not very fun-filled me. I needed something to giggle at, and I found it. I've watched episodes of Three's Company every night since, and I've had a belly laugh in EVERY single episode. (I hope the neighbours have ear muffs :-) )

Thank you John Ritter for the lesson, I don't intend to forget to laugh ever again! 

Interview with authors Jassy McKenzi and Joanne Richards

My friend Lornette Joseph and I were fortunate to attend a Bloggers get together held at Skoobs in Monte Casino recently.  We are bloggers (Check out Lornette's fantastic Madiba related post Forever A Man of the Times here) and as if the thrill of attending such an event in such an eclectic venue wasn’t enough, we were fortunate in that I was selected as one of the winners to interview authors Jassy McKenzie and Jo- Anne Richards!

Jassy Mackenzie is from a family where books weren’t just more important than television; they were so important that television was banned from the house.

Today, Jassy is the editor of HJ, a hair and beauty trade magazine. She has had numerous non-fiction articles on a wide variety of subjects published locally and internationally over the past 11 years.

Jo-Anne Richards is a South African novelist and journalist, whose work has been published internationally. She teaches creative writing through Allaboutwriting  and lectures at Wits University in Johannesburg.