As a moviemaker and a wild adventurer, I have a creative perspective on things I see or put my mind to.

Take a look at the old Hollywood epics where most of the characters were typecast with no surprises. John Wayne (if anybody remembers him) could only be John Wayne in any part he played, so whether he was cast as the gunfighter, the undertaker, or the mayor of Dodge City, you had a pretty good idea of how he would look without much prompting. The same goes for the ‘Young Turks’ that fill our television and cinema screens today; Keanu Reeves as the matrix man has to be dressed in a black with a black flowing cloak because again, he is typecast for that particular part.

So my point is, what you see is what you get in Hollywood (I can hear you falling about in hysterics). Okay, I know a lot of you folks are thinking I should up the dosage but try to keep up here.

The visual image of an oil prospector was always typecast in the movies as an unshaven guy with a sweat stained safari hat who wore khaki shorts, drank a bottle of Jack and smoked 60 Camels a day. He was usually surrounded by a lot of equipment, even a cleft stick or two. It wasn’t possible to mistake him for the Village Priest. He was usually a loner with a hidden past, most probably three marriages, an only son on death row and a lesbian daughter with her own home for abused young girls. Prospecting for oil was his job – not his life. Not a lot depended on him finding oil, in those days it was an unpopular kind of hit and miss profession that not a lot of people wanted to do.

If perchance he struck oil (no pun intended) the oil would gush from the earth to the delight of everyone. Oil drenched crews filled 44 gallon drums that were sent off to a refinery and sold for the outrageous price of around a $1.00 a barrel. In those days oil was a kind of ‘take it or leave it’ commodity because of its easy availability. Keep the image of the prospector in your mind as we fast forward to 2008.

There are almost 70 million motor vehicles on this planet and the bulk of the oil reserves belong to, as Hollywood would say in movie terms, ‘the bad guys’. Suddenly, all the guys that John Wayne used to fight moved to the Middle East and it appears, took all the oil with them. Now, how’s this for a movie? Picture our prospector standing in the middle of Iraq sipping a Jack on the rocks as Bush, Blair and some other hangers-on countries arrive in all their glory. Our prospector watches in awe as the entourage of US and British soldiers and their shiny state-of-the-art equipment spread out across the horizon stop to ask directions ‘Which way is the oil?’

So Hollywood has arrived to take the oil that does not belong to them. I’m not a politician and don’t want go there right now but the point I’m trying make is, a commodity like oil should be available to everyone at an affordable price – although it is not a renewable energy resource, how can we possibly be paying $US125 a barrel on the international market?

Is it because the resources all belong to the so called ‘bad guys’ or is it because the powers that be have successfully started a global oil war with the philosophy of ‘if you won’t sell it to us fella – we’ll come and take it’. At the moment, with a lot of our world being in turmoil, this attitude leads to wonderful international relations as we’ve noticed. Then prey do tell why do Bush and Blair look like such nice guys when in fact they are ‘the bad guys’ in the scenario; neither of them look anything like the typecast Hollywood villain.

Closer to home, the price of petrol in South Africa is almost $1.43 (ZAR7.00 to $US1.00) a litre, with a promise of $2.00 a litre by the end of 2008. I can hear some folks saying:
‘He‘s bitching about $2.00 a litre while we’re paying xxx’. It doesn’t matter that you’re paying more or less than us; the point is we are all paying too much.

Nowadays when my lady feels the need to be pampered and asks me to take her somewhere expensive – I take her down to the local gas station…

There’s a lot be said for traveling by elephant.