Saturday, 17 May 2014

Ostrich Gone Wild

It has recently been brought to my attention that I blog a lot more often during exam season. This is probably due to the fact that I am looking for any and all reasons to procrastinate and my desperate need to avoid studying because let’s be honest, there is only so much a person wants to know about the role of microorganisms in sewage water treatment.

This is probably also the reason why during exam season the whole world seems to go psycho. It is not because everyone has suddenly gone a bit loopy but rather because I suddenly start paying attention to news updates and my Twitter feed.

In the last week I have heard about how some semi-famous chick beat up her super-famous sister’s boyfriend in an elevator. I have finally joined the rest of the world in the knowledge that Gareth Cliff is trying to attract all the new Hippie Vibes by doing ‘Un-Radio’. I have heard things about Oscar’s trial that couldn’t possibly have been interesting and never would have made the newspapers. And I have watched various funny videos of cats smoking cigarettes and people falling on their faces.

It has been pretty entertaining just watching the crazy world pass-by, while I sit at my desk with my super boring textbooks spread out in front of me as if I had some intention of actually reading them, but my absolute favourite crazy moment of the week came to my attention last night and this is the one thing that makes me think that, just maybe, exam season makes the world go completely psycho.

Last night my stepdad asked me to find an article online based on a headline he had seen while driving home from work. The headline had something to do with a woman whose car had been written off by an ostrich on the west coast somewhere. When I eventually found the article in Die Burger it turned out that some woman’s car had been attacked and completely ruined by a female ostrich. The woman had been unable to speak for three days following the incident.

It was a pretty funny story but rather a let-down seeing as the entire story was in the headline and you didn’t go on to read that this ostrich had been genetically engineered to have genes from an elephant that had suddenly made it aggressive. No, it was just a female ostrich taking her frustrations out on a Merc because it was that time of the month.

My Google search for news related articles about ostriches yielded something far, far funnier. It seems that yesterday in Beijing there was a police chase which resulted in blocked off roads, major traffic and cordoned off areas due to the fact that an ostrich had decided to escape and was running around causing chaos.
Now imagine, if you will, that you are driving down the road and you’re wondering why the hell the traffic is so bad when suddenly out of nowhere in the middle of a city an ostrich come running straight at you!

You can’t help but wonder if the world has gone mad.

This is even worse when you imagine yourself to be the telephone operator for the Beijing police.

Operator: “Hello, what is your emergency?”

Some super hyper, anxious, Chinese guy: “I have just had a car accident… with an ostrich… in Beijing…”

Who makes that call? And what do you do when you get that call? And what do you do when your life-long dream is to catch criminals and instead you find yourself chasing down a crazy ostrich in the middle of Beijing?


I’m telling you, the world has gone mad, but thank goodness it has because otherwise I would have nothing to write about and I would have to be studying instead of watching a crazy ostrich on YouTube. 

Mr Road Runner

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