If You Can’t Dazzle Them With Brilliance…

When I was growing up in Zambia, my family and I would go to Zimbabwe (“Zim” to those in the know, though I can’t imagine anyone going there these days) to visit. Zimbabwe was great because you’d get coca-cola (which was banned in Zambia at the time), and not only that, it came in a can! All we had was coke in a glass bottle (which, arguably, is the superior packaging, because there is a distinct taste difference). And also, you’d get Ginger Beer in a can, and Spar-Letta drinks! Those were yummy. Oh yeah, and you’d get cheezy corn curls and all manner of potato crisps and so on. Oh right, and they had Wimpy’s Burgers (subsidiary of Burger King, I think, but I could very well be wrong). Wimpy was the fat dude in Popeye comics who was always eating burgers, remember him?

All we had in Zambia were Tip-Top sodas (not a cola among them), but they tasted decent, and they got Satwant Singh to pimp them. Great commercial that was, by the way. A shot of him driving to the finish line in his famous car, and taking a swig of some Tip-Top, finishing with a “Tip-Top: It’s tops” while looking at the camera. Even he couldn’t suppress his laughter in that commercial. As for chips, we had salt-and-vinegar (at least it’s good) and some cheezy corny curly thing called Choooz with three o’s in the name. For a while the joke was that you could recognise Zambians overseas because they were the ones ordering cokes by the liters in restaurants and airport lounges.

Right, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, Zimbabwe also had toys. I mean I was 7 or 8 when we first went there, and so it was like heaven with all the toy shops etc. I remember getting cowboy style six shooters, and a few rolls of caps. Good times.

So, we used to go to Harare (the capital), but we also used to go to Kariba (I know what the link says, but the lake divides Z from Z), and Victoria Falls (Vic Falls, to those in the know).

On one of those trips, we went to a Lord Kitchener’s store, which was basically a random collection of crap. So you’d see like this small black box which said on the cover “How to screw in the dark” with two pairs of eyes looking suggestively at each other. And on the inside? What else but a screwdriver, a match and a candle? You get the idea, but look when you’re 10, that stuff’s hilarious, ok? So anyway, knowing that my parents wouldn’t spring for that, funny as it was, I managed to get them to agree to buy me these two cardboard mini-poster thingies. They were brightly coloured with comic-like font and “witty” sayings. I didn’t know from sayings, so I just picked two and put them up in my bedroom. And they stayed up there till I graduated high school and came to the US. They were about A4 or letter sized and thickish cardboard.

The first one was bright orange and it said:

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.

I think the last word was supposed to be bullshit, but it was marketed to kids, right?

The second one I didn’t really get, and neither did anyone else, and so for some reason that made it hilarious:

Be Alert! The world needs more lerts.

I wonder if my parents kept those…

I still have no idea what that means, and it still makes me smile that I don’t.