Gosh! Too many. Henry Miller‘s Tropic of Cancer, Christopher Hitchens‘ God Is Not Great, Dante Alighieri‘s The Divine Comedy, Quentin Crisp‘s The Naked Civil Servant, Douglas Murray‘s The Madness of Crowds, Richard Dawkins‘ The Selfish Gene, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Erica Jong‘s Fear of Flying, George Orwell‘s 1984, Simone de Beauvoir‘s The Second Sex, Tama Janowitz‘s The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group.

Definitely sun, sea and sand.

Aw, the children, our most precious resource. Or is it petroleum? I never seem to remember. They won’t understand that we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. There are no nations. There is only IBM, AT&T, Dupont. These are the nations of the world. The world is a college of corporations. The world is a business. One vast and ecumenical holding company. Thanks, Paddy Chayefsky!

Joining the team at Daily Maverick under the mentorship of Branko Brkic.

Sorry, I have a laundry list. They’ve all changed my way of being in the world. Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Tom Six’s The Human Centipede, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy, Gabriele Salvatores’ I’m Not Scared, Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Dario Argento’s Suspiria, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.

Charles Darwin. Biological evolution by natural selection still blows my mind. What a genius! Oh, and kudos to Alfred Russel Wallace too.

Pseudoscience, superstition and dogma. You know, astrology, homeopathy, reiki, acupuncture, religion. It gets my goat.

I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. It involves neoprene rubber.

My best friend, Shane.

“Gawd, Heather! Kurt and Ram killed themselves in a repressed homosexual suicide pact.”

Diamanda Galas, Slavoj Zizek, Kenneth Clark, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Baudelaire, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Oscar Wilde, Noam Chomsky. Oh, and the purple teletubby because, you know, Jerry Falwell said it’s gay.

Jordan Peterson (intellectual fraud; read Nathan J Robinson’s brilliant piece in Current Affairs magazine), Deepak Chopra (the king of woo-woo monetises “mystifying” Eastern philosophy), Francis Collins (deludanoid), Mother Teresa (fetishised poverty), Ann Coulter (satan incarnate), Alfred Hitchcock (ask Tippi Hedren), Pablo Picasso (total misogynist).

Marzipan and a giant Martini. But you do know the death penalty is unconstitutional, right?

I may have said the split infinitive is a misnomer and any campaign against it is ridiculous.

Compiling news bulletins for Radio Port Natal. The computer monitors had The Matrix-style green text. Gross! Green only became de rigueur in 2017 when Pantone made “greenery” its Colour of the Year. Until then, I suffered in silence..

The internet is near invincible. It’s like a fibreoptic hydra with a regenerative ability.

“When I die, I want to go peacefully like my grandfather did, in his sleep — not screaming, like the passengers in his car.” – Jack Handey

Silly Walks.

The human genome.

Eating saturated fat during the 1980s.