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    The Sundowner Diaries
    The Sundowner Diaries
    The Sundowner Diaries
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    The Sundowner Diaries

    By R. Paul Stevens

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    About this ebook

    A Nostalgic look at Mail Ships, Drive In Cinemas, Classic Cars, and Lost Hotels - China Has Organs For Sale - Did You Spank Your Wife Last Night? - Dubai & Its Nasty Secret - I Hate Ski Lifts - Oh No! Don’t Tell Me I’ve Got Rats - Our Engagement Ring - Piers Morgan is Running America - The Amazing Story of the Reggae Reggae Sauce - The Great Google Rat Race - The Mad Hatter World of the Holy See & the Vatican - Why are Movie Stars So Short?

    [62 pages - 25000 words]

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherR. Paul Stevens
    Release dateMar 13, 2013
    ISBN9781301956371
    The Sundowner Diaries
    Author

    R. Paul Stevens

    There is a favorite line from my novella Dinner Party For Eight in which Angela asks Harry:“What do you think I am?”Harry considered this for a moment. What was she actually?“Well I suppose you are a very beautiful cook.”So if I have to answer the same question what am I actually? I would also need to consider this for a moment. I would like to say I’m an ex astronaut, have more degrees than a thermometer, have competed in the Tour de France without any EPO, surfed Teahupoo in Tahiti and emerged unscathed, sailed round the world, am an ace Alpine skier, am a member of Mensa, have a beauty queen wife and gorgeous kids, and started my own corporation which has listed on NASDAQ. I could go on but like Arnold Schwarzenegger I don’t want to boast.Well to be honest, I have gone some of the way towards all those things. I do have a letter from Wernher von Braun, I do have three degrees in Physics, I have flown in a jet plane (Emirates Air), I do cycle the mega steep hills here where I live but unfortunately can’t get EPO anywhere, I am a keen surfer who has almost managed to break his neck, I am an ocean going skipper and I did own my own yacht though if it was me I wouldn’t sail with me as captain, I do ski but you need to get out of the way, I do have a beautiful wife (though her agreeing to marry me has to be my biggest piece of luck ever) and two great kids, I do have my own software business but no stock exchanges alas and I would like to take the Mensa test but I’m pretty sure I would fail and then I wouldn’t be able to live with that so I would rather rationalize. I live in that sapphire city – Cape Town.

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      Book preview

      The Sundowner Diaries - R. Paul Stevens

      The Sundowner Diaries

      All Rights reserved © 2012 Paul Stevens

      By Paul Stevens

      Smashwords Edition

      A Nostalgic look at Mail Ships, Drive In Cinemas, Classic Cars, and Lost Hotels - China Has Organs For Sale - Did You Spank Your Wife Last Night? - Dubai & Its Nasty Secret - I Hate Ski Lifts - Oh No! Don’t Tell Me I’ve Got Rats - Our Engagement Ring - Piers Morgan is Running America - The Amazing Story of the Reggae Reggae Sauce - The Great Google Rat Race - The Mad Hatter World of the Holy See & the Vatican - Why are Movie Stars So Short?

      Introductory Sections

      A Nostalgic look at Mail Ships, Drive In Cinemas, Classic Cars, and Lost Hotels

      Look, I’ve lived long enough to be nostalgic about certain things. As life goes on, it leaves phases, customs, habits and norms in its wake, and often not for the better. Only the other day I remarked to my wife how rare it is to see a man smoking a pipe anymore. Of course smoking isn’t good for you, and that’s maybe a good thing, but at one stage pipes were very fashionable and now they have all but disappeared, though cigarette smoking is still going strong. Another thing that has disappeared almost entirely is men’s hats. A hat used to be a key fashion accessory for a man. Nowadays, it’s quite rare to see anyone on their way to the office wearing a hat. It’s out of fashion. At what point did that happen? You can’t quite pin it down, one day all us men were wearing hats, then the next day suddenly all the hats disappeared. Or was it a gradual decline into hatlessness? I can’t be sure. Nowadays maybe it’s a baseball cap back to front but where is the style in that? No, the fast pace of modern life has no time for niceties it seems.

      China Has Organs For Sale

      Whether or not you are a proponent of the death penalty you have to admire the Chinese ingenuity in devising no less than 55 ways you can be sentenced to death. This is actually down from a total of 67 ways in 2005. A full list is reproduced at the end of this article from Wikopedia. If you are a Chinese citizen it would probably pay to scrutinize this list pretty carefully before even thinking of engaging in any nefarious activities. In fact if Chinese capital offense categories were to be applied to Wall Street they would have hauled off most of the high flyers responsible for the Sub Prime crisis and executed them. The actual wording is disrupting the Order of Financial Administration and being involved in other serious circumstances. Yes, I would say these dudes seriously disrupted things, not just in their own country but the entire world.

      The Chinese government did announce in February 2012 that it had reduced the number of capital offenses by 13. But in fact this is nothing more than window dressing because the crimes relate to tax fraud, the smuggling of cultural relics or precious metals, tomb robbing and stealing fossils for which executions are rarely carried out. However if you can make it to 75 years of age then you are off the hook. This is a sort of a pension perk.

      Of course many of the crimes on the list are awful but there are many where a prison sentence only would result in Western democracies. Of course the widespread implementation of the ultimate sanction is a most useful tool by the Party to keep the masses in line. It is estimated China executed no less than 6000 people in 2004, according to Amnesty International. That was probably its best year since 2000 when they also managed to knock off an estimated 6000 people. Executions in China account for about 80% of all executions world wide.

      Did You Spank Your Wife Last Night?

      Of course, all the wives out there only have themselves to blame. For the fact that as they go about their daily business all their backsides are sore from the full on thrashing their husbands have been dishing out a lá 50 Shades of Gray. Heck the cupboard is full of new bondage and submission gear like handcuffs, special cotton ropes, blindfolds, assorted whips and other stuff best left to the imagination. And the amazing thing is that they have probably bought most of it themselves as well. It’s a bit bewildering for poor hubby to come home and here his beautiful wife is begging to be tied up in knots, and then given a decent beating by whip or a good old spanking over his knee or over the end of the bed. Of course if the husband is a sailor then this bondage thing is quite useful, because he can practice various knots like the reef or bowline en route.

      Dubai & Its Nasty Secret

      At last count, I’ve been to Dubai 12 times.

      There are no mountains in Dubai. Nor is there any rain that you can speak of. Temperatures soar to an astonishing 48 degrees Celsius in the summer months.

      This is generally accompanied by an exodus of expat wives and children to their home countries leaving the husbands behind to work and cope as best they can.

      But the winter months are pleasant. And then is a good time to visit.

      For several years my son in law was an airline pilot for Emirates. This meant an easy and cheap flight from Cape Town to Dubai. Then a 45 minute taxi ride to their villa in the desert. When I say desert, I mean desert. Basically there are several hundred of these identical villas all beautifully landscaped and gardened in the middle of exactly nowhere.

      All round is plain desert.

      (Here and there this absolutely nothing theme was punctuated by a high rise towers, surrounded by the obligatory quota of palm trees. These looked great on marketing brochures but nothing would prepare the purchaser who having bought sight unseen off a brochure arrives to check his investment, only to find the building breathtakingly alone in the middle of vast expanses of plain old Arabian Desert. That is even if he can find the building in the first place…)

      I Hate Ski Lifts

      Just as paddling out to the line up in surfing seemed to be my nemesis when I was learning the sport in my sixties, so ski lifts took on a special sort of dread for me.

      A youngster would have shrugged off the knack of getting on and off these contraptions with barely a twitch of his shoulder.

      As we age, the brain seems to slowly lower the barrier on new experiences and skills.

      In my case, it’s already full of junk a half century old or more and it hasn’t yet sat and taken note of the revolutionary message: things are different now!

      We had flown into Steamboat Springs. A great family orientated Rocky Mountain ski resort in Colorado.

      Right here is one of the reasons I embarked on a first time ski career at the age of 68.

      Sure these trips are not cheap but the stimuli input by the surroundings, the breathtaking beauty, the physical and mental challenge make them worth every single cent.

      Steamboat is not an easy place to get to. Our plane was turned back because of cloud cover and we were diverted to Salt Lake City.

      Oh No! Don’t Tell Me I’ve Got Rats!

      You know before I started writing this article I did a bit of research into this whole topic of rats. You see we had a rat invasion in our home and my sweet, loving, beautiful wife basically went berserk. But more about that later. Look, I don’t like rats any more than the next person. But I felt I had to delve into this subject to see why she has such a terrible phobia of this particular creature.

      But even I was horrified about what came up. There are presently 7 billion people in the world. And of course, at the moment, the Homo Sapiens is the dominant species. But is it going to last? I ask that because I discovered there are an estimated 5 billion rats in the world, though exactly how many no one knows. The numbers are really only being kept down by determined efforts by humans to eradicate them. But that’s pretty scary don’t you think? This population could so easily get out of control and we, human beings, would be fighting a horrible rearguard battle which probably we will lose in the end. It’s not just that there are so many of them, it’s that they breed copiously, are intelligent as anything, and tougher than nails. One nuclear war and you and I will be long gone but the rats will thrive. They probably can even feed on

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