The news came unexpectedly in a text message this morning (Tuesday 13 October 2009): “Bro Winston Mankunku Ngozi has passed on. Our deepest condolences to the bereaved family and friends. May he find peace.” Just two Sundays ago, we were paying tribute to Mankunku and his music at the inappropriately named Swingers jazz club. At […]
2009
Posted inLifestyle
The evil of meat
In a world buckling under economic recession, in a country of violence and crime and poverty, how can anyone find the time to care about the treatment of animals? The simple answer is: we have no choice. The very fabric of our humanity is being torn apart by the brutality and horrors being perpetrated, and […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Obama’s nobility clinched the Nobel
Barack Obama, to be candid, probably clinched the Nobel Peace Prize when he secured the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination last year. He has proved that words, not just actions, have power to heal in the television age. His elegant and powerful cadences have reverberated not just across that “arsenal of democracy” called America, but the […]
Posted inGeneral
Teaching Afrikaans as a foreign language
The Dutch word for “soon” is “straks”. In Afrikaans, “straks” became “maybe”. Obviously, one can have quite a bit of fun speculating on the reasons for this linguistic divergence. “T.I.A.”, some of my friends would say (usually while relaxing with sundowners on a beach): “T.I.A. — you can’t be sure of anything.” Don’t worry, I […]
Posted inGeneral
Disarray 3 — Safa 0
I usually reserve my judgements about Safa and SA football around the braai, or in a pub, since I don’t claim to know everything about football in this country. I can tell you that it is the country’s most popular sport, and with SuperSport hopping on the PSL wagon after winning the broadcast right from […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Daily Planet: Obama beats Superman
The Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo is a sort of religious site. Sitting adjacent to the harbour in central Oslo, a spot that could easily pass for Cape Town’s waterfront, the Peace Centre is a temple for serious diplomats, earnest hippies and wide-eyed, encyclopaedia-stuffed kids. I suppose the plush building is to idealistic peace-mongers what […]
Posted inGeneral
Why love really is like shopping
Sometimes food for thought can come from the least expected quarters. The other week, I watched a fascinating presentation on pricing theory by Greg Classen from TNS. He showed us graphs predicting the percentage of sales a brand could expect to lose depending on the size of a price increase. The more loyal consumers a […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Malema vs Terre’Blanche: A breeding ground for radicalism
It is with great interest that I have been following the careers of Eugene Terre’Blanche and Julius Malema. In some ways, both of them remind me of the bad things that we have tried to put behind us in this country. They both remind me of children who, in their frustration to get their points […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Political terms made easy in the new SA
Mo Shaik : shall mean the manifestation of fever symptoms every time you hear that the Spy Boss is on your trail eg “I’m being investigated that’s why I have Mo’ Shaiks” NB You don’t get Mo’ Shaiks from high blood pressure, that’s a misconception. Your appearance might become dirtier hence they speak of Shabbier […]
Posted inNews/Politics
And tonight’s winner is…the American dream
“The Merchant of Death is Dead”. As the legend goes that is the headline that changed Dr Alfred Nobel’s life. When a French newspaper prematurely published his obituary, the good doctor was confronted with a vision of how the world would remember him. As the purveyor of the finest instruments of mayhem and murder. The […]
Posted inGeneral
What do people have in common?
When I think about all the divisions among people in the world — economic, political, religious, ideological (which is already included in all three the previously mentioned concepts) — it appears somewhat ludicrous to raise the question about what people have “in common”. Right here on Thoughtleader the divergence of opinions, judgements and interpretations that […]
Posted inLifestyle
Let’s give the dikkops their due
Lo, I stand before you and say without shame: I am rather fond of dikkops. In fact, I think they’re underrated, and we should feel privileged to have them in our midst. The dikkop to which I refer is not, as an English friend of mine assumed, a dickhead, but rather the nocturnal, ground-nesting cousin […]