All right, I’ll admit it. I’m stumped. There’s a mascara ad on TV. Revlon or L’Oreal or Max Factor, I’m not sure, they all look the same, but it features that actress from Desperate Housewives, who tells us that this product gives lashes 12 times more volume. Twelve times! Imagine that. How do they measure […]
2009
Posted inNews/Politics
Mugabe: Who’s fuelling who?
The funniest thing I have read in a long time is the article about the “diesel conjurer” who was convicted of fraud for fooling Bob Mugabe’s government into thinking she could tap diesel from a rock. What makes it so funny is the fact that a con of such simplicity could not be picked up […]
Posted inLifestyle
Are you ashamed of your cellphone?
Until very recently, I was ashamed of my cellphone. The iPhone I brought with me from Australia wouldn’t work here, so I was forced to use a Nokia 66somethingorother from 19voetsek. It was terrible. No ability to surf the web. No GPS. Clunky design. Terrible sound, so that I wondered whether I was going deaf […]
Posted inGeneral
‘What about all the good things Hitler did?’
Well, apart from giving us a good dose of sadness, the VW Beetle “people’s car” and leaving us promising each other “never again”, I can’t think of anything else. And if grossly inflated vehicle prices and the ongoing massacres around the world are anything to go by, only one of those has really lasted anyway. […]
Posted inGeneral
The kind of disaster everybody wants
By Roger Diamond There’s something about being in trouble together, a binding force that brings people together, a mutual challenge or a common enemy. It seems to me that people would rather focus on such a threat, even though it’s remote or unlikely, than something more likely, but discriminatory. Take for example climate change, which […]
Posted inGeneral
Barca will regret letting Eto’o go
So Zlatan Ibrahimovic is apparently twice the player Samuel Eto’o is? Which form of reasoning Pep Guardiola used to come up with that conclusion I will never know. Statistics show that the Cameroonian hitman has been the best striker in Europe over the last five years, banging in league goals for fun. And he has […]
Posted inLifestyle
What makes you feel guilty?
What do you get paid to do? Right now I get paid to watch movies. My wage works out to about R250 an hour for two hours to sit with a group of Chinese first-year university students and watch movies — usually of my choice as they forget to bring movies of their choice. The […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Protests: Rethinking the crisis
Recent shocking images of the police shooting at South Africa’s poorest citizens were beamed around the world as people in poor communities were protesting. The damage to the country caused by these images that looked like a flashback to the 1980s is incalculable. There were more than 6 000 protests in 2005 and one academic has […]
Posted inGeneral
Do we need to bring the silkscreen poster back?
“The purpose of engagement,” said Kate Philip to a small but packed lecture theatre at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus this weekend “is to change the world, a world that is shaped by power. Power itself is not random, it is organised, and therefore to tackle forms of power, one must be organised as well”. This was […]
Posted inGeneral
China taught me to laugh, SA taught me to weep
My maid, a sweet young lass called Tang Ying, brings me a punnet of strawberries under a thick layer of purplish mould. It had been softly rotting away, hidden under a packet at the bottom of our vegetable rack. She wants to know if she should throw it away. In the Family Convenience store of […]
Posted inGeneral
Super 15 bids: SA Rugby last to submit!
Since June 8 2005 SA Rugby has carried the Eastern Cape Super Rugby franchise around its neck as a self-imposed albatross after declaring that SA had six Super Rugby franchises and this past week has seen a glaring display of dereliction of duty by SA Rugby’s Sanzar representatives. The 15th team, in an expanded Super […]