This pathological arguer cannot allow himself to be filibustered by a curve ball

I am blessed with a wide array of personality defects, such as an overinflated sense of self importance, an incredible lack of attention to detail and general belligerence.

However, the personality disorder that takes the cake is my argumentativeness. My need to start and win arguments is pathological. And I'm one of those types who will not allow reason, common decency or the World Wide Web come between me and a loud and violent debate. As a result, I'm drawn to like-minded people who love a good old scrap.

This thought was sparked off by an incident a couple of weeks ago. A friend of mine, Siyabonga, sent me an arbitrary sms containing a few "facts" about the hippo. These facts were along the lines of "Did you know that the hippo can outrun Usain Bolt; its skin is impregnable to snake bites, and it kills more humans annually than any of the other Big Five?"

Yes, I also think Siyabonga has too much time on his hands. In his defense, he may have needed to occupy his fingers during a sojourn to the bathroom. The following morning I was on the radio having a chat with my friend Kgomotso, who is also a notoriously fierce debater. I must have run out of things to say and then figured I'd regale her with this amazing revelation about how a hippo can run faster than Usain Bolt.

Without skipping a beat, she disputed the statement vociferously. Listen, I say, you can't dispute a scientific fact. Until that point, I'm quite certain Kgomotso had never given the hippo any thought, but she suddenly discovered a deep passion for zoology.

My theory is that she based her argument on two facts: she believes I'm a twit who speaks a lot of twaddle, and she'd be damned if some obese water cow was going to be faster than Bolt.

In the most condescending tone I could muster, I repeat that no one can deny a scientific fact. And this is when she hit me with the classic question: "Have you, yourself, ever seen a hippo run?" While I was still gasping, at a loss for words, she took it even further by suggesting that unless I had a YouTube clip of a hippo running, she would never believe me.

I had been operating under the impression that the general steps in scientific methodology were observation, hypothesis, prediction and experimentation. Now I was hearing that the fifth step was "sending a YouTube" clip.

I'm not sharing this story only so I can mock an absurd buddy. After all, I am the poster boy for this sort of behaviour. A few months back I was sharing some meat and amber liquids with Siyabonga, the same friend who started the great hippo debate. He made a remark about the republics of the US giving President Obama grief over the health bill. Now, what I know about the new health bill of the US is dangerous, but based on a fuzzy feeling that Siyabonga was talking BS, I found myself locked in mortal intellectual combat with him.

Being the geek he is, he'd obviously read up extensively on the subject. So he hit me with a curve ball by asking if I understood the filibuster system. I'd heard the term on CNN a few times, but as far as I was concerned the filibuster could have been a baseball term. Alternatively, it sounds like the name of a Mafia kingpin.

In any normal situation the debate should have ended at this point. But I was damned if I was going to allow this snotty upstart to filibuster me out of a good debate. So I did what all great debaters do: I abandoned any attempt to play the ball and went for the man. I believe I might have cast aspersions on his mother's character.

A few years ago I predicted that the Internet would signal the end of all debates. I was completely wrong. During the whole sordid affair, Siyabonga was fiddling with his BlackBerry. But I believe he was chatting on Facebook.

As for the great hippo debate, I found a YouTube clip of a hippo running amok through a forest. It was dismissed on some kind of technicality, so the debate was never settled.

I'm proud to announce I have passed on the ferocious argumentative gene to my five-year-old son. My wife was explaining to him that it was his bedtime because all kids are in bed at that time. His retort was: "You haven't gone into all the houses in the world and seen that all kids are sleeping, so how do you know this?" She gave the best response under the circumstances: "Because I say so."