The Last Yap

Every hero needs a villain. Villains have always been undermined throughout history. Period. Their only purpose in a movie has been to provide aesthetic fodder to the super-human antics of the heroes. They are the ones who get shot multiple times, sucked; by the handsome neighborhood vampire, sawed off with electric saws, thrown off unnecessarily tall buildings, gulped down by big fat snakes, fed in to aircraft propellers, light- sabered , bombed; with the bomb cleverly slipped into their pants, eaten; by the local werewolf-hunk, drowned, strangled, wrist-slashed, fed with cyanide and expelliarmus-ed;  to name just a few. And as if this wasn’t enough, they also have to listen to the heroes blabber on about righteousness, good versus evil and saving the occasional hot girl. But as time would have it, all of that is changing. Villains are not so easy to run over anymore. They are cold, vicious, macabre and calculating. They exact vengeance with a steely determination. They plot ...

When I was a kid , I loved going to doctors. It was incredible. They stuck sharp gleaming needles in your arse, sang soothing poems while they did it, and then gave you toffees as a parting gift, which proved to be so much more effective than the painkillers and left you feeling great about yourself. However, this feel-good syndrome was applicable only to ‘normal’ doctors, that is, all types of doctors besides dentists. After having been at the mercy of various practitioners in the medical arena, I have come to fear dentists the most. Almost every other type of doctor, and this has been true since the dawn of time and doctors; does the damage that is due to a patient when the patient is unconscious, either naturally because they passed out like a scaredy-cat, or because they have been anaesthetized. It is only the dentist that cruelly instructs you to open your mouth wider, ignores your meek whelps of pain, and proceeds to grind a drill into your teeth and plays with your nerve...