There are some places from childhood that don’t just stick in your memory - they cling, like the scent of old aftershave in a barbershop. For me, one such place was Mac’s Barbershop on Barkly Road. It sits right at the top of my memory list.
Image: DFA / Created with assistance from ChatGPT (OpenAI), April 2025
THERE are some places from childhood that don’t just stick in your memory — they cling, like the scent of old aftershave in a barbershop.
For me, one such place was Mac’s Barbershop on Barkly Road. It sits right at the top of my memory list.
Yes, a few decades ago, I had hair. Lots of it. So much, in fact, my parents probably feared I’d end up looking like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family if they kept me from Mac’s for too long.
I loved those visits. Not the buzzing clippers, mind you — you learned early to sit very still, unless you wanted a crooked “hap” on the back of your head. No, it was the walls that fascinated me: yellowed calendars, dusty photographs, and wooden plaques with one-liners that ranged from cheeky to downright confusing.
One read: “It begins when you sink into his arms…” — with a man offering flowers to a woman. Next to it: “… and ends up with your hands in the sink.” — with a very unimpressed wife.
Classic!
There were over a dozen, and I have forgotten most of them, except the one I could never understand.
But the one that always puzzled me was this: The picture showed a clueless guy at a roulette table, surrounded by smiling companions, with the caption: “There’s a sucker born every minute … and three born to take him in.”
I didn’t get it. “Take him in” where? A casino? A room full of con men? It wasn’t funny to me. It took a decade – and a 1985 Mike and the Mechanics song – for it to finally click: “taken in” meant duped, fooled, conned.
I had my lightbulb moment!
There’s always someone naïve, innocent, trusting, who falls for a prank or a hoax. And sometimes … it’s you.
Just this week, I watched a guy on YouTube demonstrate a “beauty hack” he’d heard from a “friend”: Cut open a habanero pepper and rub the juice under your eyes to reduce puffiness.
He did it. Then he stopped speaking and blinked, then screamed and then wept while screaming.
One thing I suspect is that he definitely developed trust issues for life.
But this kind of blind trust isn’t limited to viral stunts and the proliferation of social media pranks. It runs deeper.
Earlier this week, this very newspaper reported how Coca-Cola – backed by groups like the Sugar Research Foundation – misled the public for years about the safety of its products. Add to that the way misinformation spreads online like wildfire, and it becomes clear: we’re often too eager to hand our thinking over to anyone who sounds confident or wears a white coat.
Even AI can be a bit dodgy. I recently read that AI engines often prefer generating plausible-sounding answers rather than admitting “I don’t know”.
So, before you copy and paste, read and think.
Psychiatrist and author Dr Timothy R Jennings puts it rather bluntly: “We are being misled, misinformed, and manipulated by propaganda, and our emotions are being exploited – all designed to confuse minds and get people to ignore truth, ignore evidence, ignore reality, and align with fantasy, align with wishful thinking …”
His advice? “Every person must exercise their God-given individuality, think for themselves, and learn to examine evidence and facts for themselves.”
Just because someone in power says something, doesn’t mean it’s true – not unless the evidence is there to back it up. As Jennings quips: “Claiming a dog is a cat doesn’t make it so – even if you dress the dog up like a cat. Claiming a daisy is a rose doesn’t make it so – even if you paint the daisy red.”
In the end, that old, cryptic barbershop plaque wasn’t just a joke. It was a quiet warning, hanging unnoticed among the clippers and aftershave: And the warning: Don’t be the sucker.