The View From the North collective is bemused at all the fuss over 2009's Sax Appeal.
Not that it takes much to bemuse the collective, mind you, remembering that the IQ of any committee is the sum of the IQs of the members divided by the number of arms and legs...but we digress.
The fuss about Sax Appeal.
We reiterate: Hey, it's just...Sax Appeal, for the sake of any deities you could name!
Every year Sax Appeal is replete with bad taste, questionable humour, poor illustrations, and nasty digs at famous and not-so-famous people. Every year since 1974 - which is as far as the collective's collection goes back - Sax Appeal has annoyed the righteous, offended the godly, and abused blondes and van der Merwes.
Pretty even-handed, if you ask us.
But this particular year, "Christians" have taken particular offence at a LIFE Magazine photospread parody (entitled "LIE", in white-on-red), which details "Top Ten Atheist Retorts to Fundamentalist Christians". Most of the collective thought these were fairly clever, as Sax Appeal offerings go, and the atheists among us chortled heartily. Some appeared pointless, though, and the C.U.N.T. panel - Christian who Understands No Theorems, to be explicit - was brash and could easily have been reworded. Possibly along the lines of T.O.O.L. - Totally Out Of Line....
But no-one called Jesus a tool, as one newspaper detailed: rather, the panel read "I bet he feels like a tool now". Just the kind of thing a brash young atheist might pop out with, especially after an amber nectar or two. Why, one of the more unruly of us sort of remembers a time in a Zimbabwe Gents' facility, when an inebriated God-botherer who said he felt the Holy Spirit like fire down his throat, was told CENSORED...OK, OK, we'll leave that one out, grumble, grumble....
And now UCT has apologised for the issue, after the good and the godly induced Pick n' Pay to remove the magazine from their shelves.
Apologised for a Sax Appeal!!??...why, this just opens the floodgates! Next we'll have the Leagually Blondes objecting to jokes like the ones which start "How does a blonde turn on the light after...*?"; whole families, nay, wagonloads of van der Merwes will seek to block any mention of their nominative kin; Al Qaeda and in fact the whole Qaeda clan will sue to prevent any tasteless suicide bomber jokes (both groups will obect to mention of an Afrikaans terrorist called Ossewa Ben Lategan) - and so on, and on, and on.
Ah, me us.... Seeing as he apologised for it, let's just called the thing "Max Appeal", and let him edit the sorry rag. It certainly couldn't get any worse.
But people, a little perspective please: it is a student magazine, with all of the immaturity and bad taste that may connote, sold in the main by raucous scantily-clad young people - WHICH BENEFITS A CHARITY.
We can't help thinking, however, that Greyness stalks the land, with his handmaid Politikal Korrectness...and we should go meekly back to our whited sepulchres ivory towers, and behave.
* = she opens the car door.
