Driver's Guide To The Universe

If there’s one thing that the Bible has taught me, it’s that Dungeons and Dragons is evil. The tool of the devil, which disguises itself as a “game”, is a gateway to the world of the occult and Satan worship. In order to better illustrate this I’m posting Dark Dungeons, an informative little piece written in the early eighties that I should have known existed, but didn’t until I discovered it in a Topless Robot article.

You can’t tell me there’s not at least one fatty that plays with this group. This is also the only D&D session in the history of mankind where the number of girls equals the number of guys and there’s a hot female DM.

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My best friend is a much more dedicated blog reader then I am and I often receive URLs to the better-written entries of some of the bloggers around the world. She also often asks me about how things are in South Africa; she had not lived in the country for quite a few years. She is always interested to know what the prevailing attitudes and opinions are. Yesterday, she sent me a link of this blog entry that this site, the South African Blog Awards 2007, has deemed the winner of the "Best Post on a South African Blog" category. If I remember her question correctly, she was thoroughly unimpressed with the entry and asked if she is so out of touch with South African humour that people found this funny.

I had only lived in Copenhagen for 7 months, but obviously I am also out of touch with SA humour as well. The entry, made by a well-educated Capetonian business owner in his late twenties lacks grammatical errors and he has formatted the text and the accompanying pictures to make the best of the entry. In the entry he makes fun of his maid's cryptic badly-written notes to him, but his barbs lack the good naturedness with which many like comments/entries are made. He rips apart a person, who due to her disadvantaged background will never read his grammatically-correct whine.

However, back to the writing and my search on what made this entry so memorable that people felt it deserved the award. He comes across as harsh and condescending, sniping away at every single criticism that is presented to him and indulges in gratuitous
self-patting for his brilliance - sorry, but good grammar is a way to ensure you have more readers not awards. He finishes off the entry with the same satisfaction as Colombo closing a murder investigation.

I do not think that 7 months is such a drastic period in a country to find out that in order to appreciate good humour one must descend to pettiness and cruel name-calling. I am rather hoping that due to the Internet still being accessible to less people in South Africa and thus making the awards merely less well-known, then an indicator that sneering cruelty is the key to getting a smile out of South Africans.

As far as this 'award-winning' blog entry goes, one wonders why he never mentions on his blog, is that probably, her wage for a day is less then his bill for a lunch at a good restaurant. This fact is that if there are entries mentioning this, they don't even get noticed.