My cousin Jessica Joubert in the news

MaxRedline found this and I pinched it from him.
Jessica, The Hippo:

Jessica weighs almost a ton and enjoys sweet coffee and a massage before she goes to bed. She's a hippo with a big identity crisis - she thinks she's a family pet.

Tonie Joubert, a retired game warden from Hoedspruit in South Africa, found her washed up on his land by flood water when she was just a day old.

He hand raised her, fully expecting her to return to the wild as soon as she was old enough. That was seven years ago and Jessica has never left.

"I don't know whether she thinks I'm a hippo or she thinks she's a human," Tonie explained as he deposited another fistful of sweet potato inside Jessica's gaping mouth.

"But we have the most fantastic bond." When Tonie calls her name, Jessica honks out her own greeting in return.

His wife, Shirley, is equally smitten. "I can't imagine life without her. She's the child I never had," she said.

Jessica certainly seems to believe she's part of the family and regularly forces her way into the house.

"We try to keep the door closed, but she pulls down the handle and lets herself in," Shirley told me.

"She's already broken a bed and a sofa, and it can be very messy because she's not house trained."

Jessica's favourite room is the kitchen, where she rests her huge snout on the counter and flips open her jaws at the first hint of food.

Eating is a big part of Jessica's routine. She consumes a tenth of her body weight every day.

There's sweet coffee in the morning and evening, sweet potatoes for breakfast, lunch and supper, and regular snacks of dog biscuits which she shares with the Jouberts' seven English bull terriers.

There used to be nine dogs but two were eaten - by crocodiles not Jessica.

In between meals Jessica wallows in the river which runs through the Jouberts' land and she often swims with a pod of wild hippos who are regular visitors. She is free to leave but chooses to stay.

Hippos kill more people than any other mammal in Africa and yet Jessica, despite her vast bulk and big teeth, seems anything but deadly.

At night she settles down on the veranda beneath a pink duvet and Shirley, a former beauty therapist, gives her a massage before Jessica drifts off to sleep.

The Joubert side of my family has always been a bit nuts. Jessica reminds me a bit of my great aunt, Tannie Mehitabel Joubert Du Plessis - similar face and same figure - but my aunt was house-trained.

Lugar: "It's over"

When Lugar speaks the other GOP Senators listen. I personally cannot stand the man. To me he has always looked like a grinning fool. Ever since he spearheaded the Senate sanctions against South Africa in 1984 (going so far as to suck up to Jesse Jackson in the process) I have despised Lugar.

Reagan's "constructive engagement" with South Africa and his resolute detestation of communism was already allaying the fears of change among white South Africans when Lugar had to poke his nose in. He is an insincere man given to sucking up.

White South Africans' greatest fear at that time was of being overwhelmed by a partially civilized communist-controlled black majority. The communist threat was very real to white South Africans whose sons were dying in Namibia and Angola fighting Russian-financed Cuban troops.

White South Africans (with Reagan's guidance) were making significant and sincere changes in their attitudes and their laws. I was visiting my family there at that time and was amazed and pleased at how much had changed in the five years that I had been away. Effectively - culturally, socially and legally - apartheid had ceased to exist. Partial franchise had already been conceded and I met one of the black members of Parliament. The only hurdle remaining to leap was universal franchise - the biggest fear of the minority whites outnumbered by communist-inclined blacks by ten to one.

These fears were not unfounded. Communist Cuban soldiers continued killing the sons of white South Africans in southwest Africa and at home there were riots so violent as to lead to deaths and vicious black schoolkids were "necklacing" black policemen at the urging of the seemingly insane Winnie Mandela and her communist cohorts in Berkeley.

At that moment the grinning fool, Lugar, stepped forward and stood beside Jesse Jackson to pronounce white South Africans "evil racists."

[BTW - just in case you don't know what "necklacing" is: black school-kids - average age ten - would stone a black policeman or anyone that they deemed a "traitor to the cause" to exhaustion and submission and then place a tire around his/her neck, douse it with gasoline and set it on fire. It is an excruciatingly painful and horrendously humiliating death. Fortunately many black South Africans are Christians or it would have been worse because pre-Christian animist Africans are even more barbaric than Arabs and we know how barbaric Muslims are. Oops - did I just call a spade a spade? Sorry to be so un-PC.]

Well, Lugar more than makes up in phony PCness to let me off the hook. It was the behavior of the Jesse Jackson sucker-uppers who completely put me off the socalled "liberals" in the USA. I saw clearly that the "liberals" were hypocritical, insincere, superficial poseurs. And I lumped Lugar in with that bunch of silly, shallow sheep.

But, sadly, Lugar's condemnation of South Africa was heard and heeded by many Congressional Republicans and they followed his lead instead of Reagan's and now we are stuck with a South Africa ruled by Marxist/John Lennonists even more phony, corrupt, stupid and infantile than those who run Berkeley.

Yep, I have hunch that Lugar's just announced the end of the battle on one front - Iraq. I'm older than I was when Lugar insincerely and opportunistically jumped on the Jesse Jackson band-wagon over twenty years ago and can now concede that Lugar is simply conveying what his constituents think. Americans were uninformed and wrong about South Africa and are probably uninformed and wrong about Iraq but the fact is that a majority support for the war in Iraq is over.

Cheerfulness vs envy and resentment

Nearly everyone, after that first perfect love is lost, can mope around and feel sorry for themselves, and whine and moan and ham it up like a bitter broken-hearted Gloria Swanson bitch. But hopefully, there comes a time for all of us when the penny drops and you realise that being cheerful and optimistic is actually easier and more fun than being miserable and pessimistic.

Trouble is some adults never outgrow their teenage pout-fests and become nagging prudes, sour puritans, nasty Nazis, weak and dependent socialists, power-crazed communists and insane Islamic terrorists always seeing the world through lenses of negativity and paranoia, as a cess-pit of frustration, oppression and terrifying dangers.

Well, this world can sometimes be not all that nice and comfortable and it's definitely not perfect. And we can never escape sickness and death. But it's not all that awful and the beauty nearly always outshines the bad. There's a lot more loveliness to enjoy than ugliness to abhor. And a cheerful, grateful attitude can do more good than any whining and moaning ever can.

So why have the supposedly utopian-minded and once upbeat "liberals" become so angry, bitter and hateful? Because they have run out of ideas (some of which were fairly good and some of which were really bad) but all of which have been shown to be based on coercion and manipulation and not on true (Lockean) liberalism - optimism, belief in one's individual sovereignty, the joy of hard work and sensible unpretentious creativity.

Today's "liberals" aren't liberal at all. In the 1930s the Communist Party in the USA decided to use the word "liberal" whenever they meant "socialist" because they knew that Americans did not like the beehive groupthink mentality of the Soviet Socialism in Russia or the National Socialism in Germany as they detested any curtailment of their individual freedoms.

So, American socialists re-invented themselves as "liberals" and have taken over the Democratic Party. Everyone knows that the Dems are now a socialist party. Some of us don't mind too much because we're willing to compromise with the wusses and sissies who like having a big nanny government. And some of us don't like it at all. But most of us realize that the Democratic Party, socalled "liberals" and socialism are here to stay because at least half of the human race never outgrows its juvenile sulkiness.

That doesn't mean that we'll stop telling the wusses to grow up and face reality. No one's going to harm you in the USA except criminals and they're not in the majority. Most of us are decent people who aren't going to kill you or steal from you or bear false witness against you or, as the most "fevered imaginations" might think, send you to concentration camps in Alaska.

Most of us are not power-crazed egomaniacs. We are quite happy with the little bit of power and control we have over our own lives and circumstances. It's only insecure and frightened people who crave power over others and most of us are happy, comfortable, contented and confident enough not to feel insecure and inadequate.

And most of understand that the best thing we can do for others is to be cheerful and kind not bitter and angry. We also know that we can't help others of we haven't got anything to give. So, we work hard and get rich. A lot of us think the USA is great (no, not perfect - just not so bad really) and we don't want to change anything too much or too quickly. I guess that makes us "conservatives."

Like Thomas Paine, we think government is a "necessary evil" not a panacea. And like John Locke, we believe that "the only purpose of government is to protect private property." We like having our legal guns because we know that the criminals definitely have illegal ones. We like being free to worship God as we please and pursue our happiness in the privacy of our own homes as we wish as long as it does not harm another.

We like owning our own homes - preferably forty acres (and throw in the mule coz it's cheaper and more reliable than an SUV) and running our own businesses and we mostly vote Republican (even if we're independent or libertarian) because it's the lesser of two evils.

My South African guinea-fowl

The guinea-fowl keets are all grown up and, on Saturday, we let them out of the hen-house for the first time to roam in the meadow. Guinea-fowl are more closely related to turkeys than chickens. They are very noisy birds. The hens bray - heehaw - like donkeys and the cocks have a strange sharp staccato extraterrestrial-sounding call. Hearing them makes me feel like I am back in Africa.



The guinea-fowl detest our cat who stalks them. This is a video of guinea-fowl chasing off a wild cat in their native habitat in Africa.



Guinea-fowl are fearless and are known to kill snakes in the wild. In this video they attack a poor terrified puppy.



BTW - they are delicious.

Dune

I live on the edge of the Oregon Dunes National Park which is about fifty miles long and sometimes more than two miles wide. There are parts of the dunes that look as strange as the moon. Long strecthes of the dunes are bleak and almost scary because you feel like you might get hopelessly lost and then suddenly you come upon a forest surrounding a lake like an oasis in a desert of sand.

Frank Herbert, the author of "Dune," used to come down to this coast and spend the weekends camping out in the dunes when he was a student at the university in Eugene in the 60s. He used to take LSD and his drug-induced visions among the vast emptiness of the dunes was the inspiration for his books. My piece of forest is just south of the biggest white blob on the Google satellite map below.