by Colin Hyde

Ever since a US presidential hopeful named Bob Dole started hawking blue pills to revive old men or men in poor health, hardeners have become dinner table talk. Today there’s no respect for the divisions God gave to the 24 hours. He made night, and He made day, the latter for work, and the former for play. That’s the design. These Americans just have no respect.

I’m prompted today by a recent roast of top former NFL quarterback, Tom Brady. This roast thing isn’t a staple in Belize, and before crass people got involved it was worthy of emulating. Briefly, the Wikipedia says it “is a form of comedy, originating in American humor, in which a specific individual, a guest of honor, is subjected to jokes at their expense, intended to amuse the event’s wider audience … The assumption is that the ‘roastee’ can take the jokes in good humor and not as serious criticism or insult.” LUMEN says a “roast is a speech honoring someone, usually a close friend or colleague. The lead-up to the honoring part is full of humorous stories, jokes of all sizes and descriptions, and sometimes biting sarcasm and satire.” And all that is good. Further on, when LUMEN says “It often pushes the bounds of decency a little”, that’s okay too. But then, it went from grass to you-noa-wat. LUMEN didn’t hold back on this slide, saying “sometimes it pushes them [the decency thing] a lot!”

There are people who can’t take a joke. I bet per capita Belize has more sacred cows than anywhere else. This present PM is the first one we’ve had who noh tek tings too personal. It is to be hoped that who is next in line doesn’t try to take us back to the bad old days. People who put themselves up for big public office shouldn’t get testy when they get jabbed. Very little should be off limits with these characters, because they’re at the top of the coconut tree, where we find all the prime nuts for drinking, and for making pies and oil. The only time it’s wrong to peek from the ground floor to the high floor is if there are ladies up there and they are wearing skirts.

This American roast, too often it sinks to the sewers. There’s nothing nice about gutter. People dive there because it’s easy. It’s easy because it’s animal, and we are animals. The civilization thing is all about us rising above our base behaviors. I know about these things. I won’t say they were successful, but ma, pa, grampa, and aunties worked hard to save me.

More and more these fellows mention the rawest sex things. It takes some talent to handle jokes about weight, drinking, failures. You can have a lot of fun with food and drinks. Politics is funny. When it comes to sex, only those with the highest skills know how to handle the funny part of that. The vast majority sink into sleknis. The people who laugh at slek jokes, they’re either crass or they are embarrassed.

Somebody has to stand up to people who get dirty in public. These people were roasting an athlete, and they sank into a savage rundown of two of the brother’s ex-girlfriends. Apart from most bedroom/closet business being off limits in daylight, these ladies didn’t volunteer for the roast. It was about the man, not about them. It wasn’t funny. It was cheap, and America should be ashamed for not calling them out. Bah to talking about the man’s sexual contacts. Bah, that American train is off the tracks.

You know how it will end because of so much ugly. One of these days a roastee will pull out a gun and say, now let’s do something really funny. You know all Americans have guns in their back pockets. No, no, he won’t kill the roaster. He’ll use his gun to take away the microphone from the roaster who went low, and then, with a glass of ginseng, he’ll roast the roaster, I mean run down ih ma, ih pa, ih pikni, ih granny, everybody.

Bully, here in Belize we stay within the lines. But too far within the lines, iffn yu ask me. But we do skewer. And I have some famous local beef right here to put on the fire.

This Mr. Gegg really talk big

Mr. Gegg of Portico fame had a good day at the Senate, until toward the end of the show when he went and spoiled it all with some of the most outrageous conceit. I know you had trouble catching your breath at the end there. It’s not often we see such swagger. Did that man think he was talking in front of a mirror? We’re all allowed to get carried away in our private spaces. We’re not to forget when we step out of our front door that mama and papa might think wi white, but we are not.

Bah, that man, talking big like that, when he hasn’t any money—he said that—and all the evidence says he’s got no sex appeal. For a fact, Janelle doesn’t like him. She and her people couldn’t even write his name. That’s how come the letter to him was addressed to his revered but departed dad. Nobody wants to speak with you, David!

My, so very often the children of well-off people are spoiled brats. Mr. Bally had money and he owned Vogue, and a lot of people were partial to him, including some of my family. But there is something wrong with this plug. At the Senate we learned the extent Tracy went to foil his ambitions. When women like a man, they will do all kinds of dirty work for him. Notice how successful men politicians in Belize always have women out there batting for them.

Ahem, I thought this thing was a summons, not an invitation. Well, well, Mr. Gegg has important meetings, so the Senate has to fit into his schedule. What kind of country are we living in? I say, you could understand the Senate trying to accommodate a man going about earning his daily bread, but Gegg calling his foreign meetings important, barefaced, in front of a glass window without curtain, is preposterous. It takes no computing to conclude that this brother has no important meetings! People who go to important meetings have money. And he said he has none.

Following on that, my nose says these “important” meetings must be about hustling free top shelf drinks and expensive food. Using our beautiful “nature’s best kept secret country” as a pass, he jets around the world to wherever the big cruise ship meetings are at. The math there is pretty straightforward. Gegg lives at these meetings. Gegg has no money. Clearly, these meetings aren’t producing anything financially.

But wait—I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being made a fool of: we might have been fed false information. This poverty claim might be all perception. He said he had been offered 7 figures to get the ship Portico under sail. We know that absolutely no one offers a poor man that kind of money. Those UDP bohgaz would have known the extent of his bank account (let’s not put too much into confidentiality clauses with bank accounts); if Gegg was broke the offer would have been more like 7 dollars, nothing like the quantum suggested. I say, the saving grace here then, and it would amount to no more than reducing a hanging to a multiple life sentence, would be that we are working with different definitions of broke.

I’m like, real – that word I never use – over how this hearing ended. But angry as I am, I must give that devil his due, congratulate him for his sterling integrity if he told the reds their money couldn’t buy him. Not everyone can turn down fat money offers from the governments. That’s all I will give him. Hey, Janelle, don’t play softball with this man. All of Belize was tuned in, live or on tape, and what is clear is that if you give this one an inch he’ll take all the land by Northern Lagoon. Set the date. Announce it. Just make sure yu address the summons to David bikaaz wi doant want no ekskyooziz.