I don't know what kind of religious programming they air in South Africa, but it is apparently rather compelling: "A South African man who wanted to watch a World Cup football match instead of a religious programme was beaten to death by his family, police said today."

Here is of those moments when the internet shows you that there are other people who pretty much know exactly how your dumb brain operates, either because their brains operate the same dumb way, or, more frighteningly, because their brains are smarter and they're hoping to somehow profit off this fact. Even worse, they work faster than you: I read a story at Discovery this morning about how South African wineries have been having a problem with baboons sneaking into their vineyards and eating the grapes.

Beaches have been closed in South Africa after a 37-year-old Zimbabwean man was apparently eaten by what has been described as "dinosaur-sized shark" off Fish Hoek beach in Cape Town. "We saw the shark come back twice," British beach-goer Phyllis McCartain told the Cape Times. "It had the man's body in its mouth, and his arm was in the air. Then the sea was full of blood." Another witness, Dennis Lundon, said, "I never want to experience this again. I'm going to block it out of my mind."

This is pretty embarrassing, but one night, when I was a freshman in college, my friend Todd and I got so high from smoking pot that we thought we could read each other's minds. We were in my room doing too many bong hits and one of us (I'll take responsibility, though I don't remember for sure) had the brilliant idea of, "What would happen if we drank the bongwater?" I know: yuck: we might as well have eaten used cigarette butts. But this is the state we'd put ourselves in.

The Independent talks to former South African President F.W. de Klerk. Twenty years ago today de Klerk delivered an opening address to Parliament. "When he sat down 30 minutes later, the ANC and 30 other political parties, including the Communist Party, had been unbanned unconditionally; the death penalty was suspended; the state of emergency was lifted; trade unions were allowed to function freely; all political prisoners were to be released immediately and restrictions on political exiles were lifted; and, perhaps most importantly of all, de Klerk opened the way for South Africa's first fully democratic election in 300 years by promising 'a totally new and just constitutional dispensation [...]

Sorry, everything is so horribly dark today! It might be the pouring rain. Or you know, the end of the world. Here, here is the worst story on earth, which is an anonymous survey of 1738 men on how often they have raped people in two provinces of South Africa. A full 28% of men surveyed admitted to raping women; 10% of men said they'd been raped by another man. Least surprising: half of the rapists said they had done it more than once. Okay onward with this day I guess.

The news that South African song lyrics have been declared unconstitutional-recently performed was a "Zulu ditty" of very recent historical provenance "with lyrics that say 'Dubula ibhunu,' meaning 'Shoot the Boer,' the Afrikaans word for farmer that is often held to refer to whites in general" (and this happened concurrently with the murder of a white supremacist)-seems as good a time as any to point you to this 1973 Jet feature on Eartha Kitt and her work both in Watts and South Africa. It goes like this: "But the one ghetto which has also found a special place in her heart is in Swaziland, South Africa. [...]

It is probably a little too early in the day to share this one with you, but I have been puzzling over it since dawn and am ready to be rid of it. I'm not quite sure what's going on in today's South Africa, but apparently it involves rapping ninjas, protection-needing butterflies, and progeria sufferers. I'll let Die Antwoord's lead ninja explain it himself: "To sum it all up, in this place, South Africa, you get a lot of different things: whites, coloureds, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, watookal-I'm like all these different things, all these different people, fucked into one person." [Via]

Big questions, Big Love: Who will be South Africa's first lady now that polygamist Joseph Zuma is set to become the nation's president? More importantly, just how many wives has this guy had? I count five, but I probably missed one or two in the thickets of this article.