yo so today I am meeting my good mate and longtime companion Shaun for lunch before he flies to Athens tomorrow to be forever welded in wedlock to Vicki, a lovely Greek girl he met in London where they both did their PhDs together. It was all hella romantic and whatever - they came out to .za last year - and he's a .za boy, through and through - for her first visit to our sunny shores and he took up to the top of Table Mountain, which is that bit of Cape Town you see on all the postcards and in all the music videos which everyone seems to film out here (and I mean everyone - Blue, Roger Goode, A, Underworld, Tina Turner etc) and right there, looking out over the Bay, he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him and she even did the grand gesture and said yes. That was last January. Wedding is in about 2 weeks time in the Greek heat. So this afternoon will be all ball-and-chain jokes and stupid, unnecessary shit like that, which both Shaun and I are very, very good at. Our very favourite stupid, unnecessary thing, though, is peanut wars. When you add up the victories over the years, we probably come out even. But I'll temporarily concede the lead to him, since he is about to acquire a whole new set of problems for the next few decades. And there will probably be a fuss in the restaurant if we take up defensive positions - him behind the maitre'd and me in the kitchens - and begin bombarding each other with salted redskin peanuts, or even peanuts and raisins when we feeling hoity-toity, for a decider. In other news, the Michael Phelps roadshow continues in Athens, starring the man himself and about 15 000 supporting cast, extras and crew. You gotta feel for the kid, I suppose, since all the hype comes from the media, but jeez, even fucking CNN has a nightly Phelps' Corner in their sports broadcast - I can't imagine they had a Vitaly Scherbo Corner in Barcelona in '92 when he won 6 golds for gymnastics, did they? He seems like a nice enough kid, I suppose, although the rest of the Games seem to pale into insignificance around him - not exactly fair to the other 10000 athletes - and on CNN last night they mentioned how he had won a gold in a relay, the 4x200m freestyle. Presumably there were 3 others on the team, but damned if I can tell you who they were, because they did not crack the nod to get their names mentioned on tv, that's for sure. Spare a thought for some unfortunate archer, or Tae Kwon Doist, who may also hold several medals and be world class and the best-ever in their field, because they will never be a household name based on Athens 2004. And I'll out fifty bucks on Flipper and Rudy Giuliani being the 2 hot favourites to light the flame if New York is given the Games for 2012. Any takers? Okay, yes, maybe it is just jealousy. But I'm not jealous of his voice, that's for sure. Nor those belonging to the Hamm brothers, the Dumais brothers, or Brazilian World Cup captain Cafu, all of whom have really unfortunate voices which actually just don't seem to fit their bodies or faces, it must be said. Catty, I know. Hopefully our newest golden boy Roland Schoeman (pronounced sku-mun) will get his 2nd gold tonight at 7:09 CAT (that's 5:09pm GMT - work out your timezones from that, yeah?) and we are expecting our 2 world-champ highjumpers to also come in for gold on Sunday. Unlike our shot-putters, who put the sodding shot everywhere but where it needed to go. And there is a triple header against the filthy Australians tomorrow - Olympic Hockey, Olympic rowing and the Tri-Nations series rugby final. As a .za boy, even a .za-after-tranplantation-from-.zw boy, I am obliged to hate the Australians. And technically the English, although I don't know why, and I sort-of am one, so I don't. The Aussies do also have stupid voices and accents, though, so that's a good enough excuse. Yes, we love prejudice. cheers! -d-