By Baikong Mamid It’s difficult going anywhere without getting caught up in the football fever these days. The World Cup is in the semi-final stage this week and I have to admit that the football bug has bitten me in a big way — even though I was never a football fan before. Now I […]
2010
Posted inSport
Has a footballer ever managed to reverse a referee’s decision?
It’s a question that begs asking, isn’t it? Every time a referee reaches into his pocket to extract a card, he is swamped by players wearing looks of thunderous incredulity on their faces and waving their arms in dramatic disbelief. Never mind the fact that more often than not everybody on the field saw the […]
Posted inGeneral
Thinking big by starting small
Originally featured in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on June 30, 2010 and written by Danielle Nierenberg, Molly Theobald and Stephanie Hanson. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the fact that 1 billion people worldwide are going to bed hungry every night. And, in the United States, it is easy to look at sub-Saharan Africa — where the […]
Posted inGeneral
Uncapped bandwidth, capped service delivery
After all the euphoria, back-patting and chest-thumping of the MWeb uncapped DSL offering, which spurred on other ISPs to follow suit, we are now going through the first major test of what happens when real service delivery (this time not the governmental variety), and genuine customer support is required. The Seacom undersea cable went down […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Our small part in Selebi’s downfall
By Stefaans Brümmer I take no pleasure in seeing a man go down, stripped of his dignity, exposed for his lies. That sense is more acute in the case of Jackie Selebi, convicted of corruption on Friday. For Selebi’s story is in many ways a parable of our democracy: it is a story of struggle, […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Oh Selebi, did you have to be so cheap?
If you are looking for a serious deliberation on the quite frankly embarrassing conviction of former police commissioner and ex-Interpol chief Jackie Selebi, then you my friend are at the wrong place. If however you, just like me are flabbergasted at just how little it took to bring down a man who had access to […]
Posted inLifestyle
Soon, the jihad may come to a church bazaar near you!
According to the annual Minority Rights Group report published a few days ago, “religious intolerance is the new racism”. What that means, in a nutshell, is that people are no longer hating other people on the grounds of the colour of their skin, but by the kind of scarves they wear, what day of the […]
Posted inLifestyle
Getting it on in public
My experience of white middle-class South Africans is that we tend to be very wary of others. Whether tucked away in gated communities, encapsulated in our cars, or running in the gym with headphones on, we like to keep at a distance from others. Even when in public, at the shops for example, we are […]
Posted inGeneral
Soccer philosophy
What do soccer and philosophy have in common? Or, to put it another way — what interest do they share? It is probably safe to say that these interests are, first and foremost, moral and aesthetic. Was it Camus who said that everything he had learned about morality — or was it life — was […]
Posted inGeneral
Unfuckingbearable
To have lost 3-0 would have been better, far better, than this. Sport, mirroring life, can be cruel. Very cruel. Ghana had showed such character and discipline in withstanding Uruguay’s sustained initial onslaught, carefully restoring parity in possession, to the point whereby with the first half on the point of expiration, the Black Stars had […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Why did Mbeki ‘protect’ Selebi?
Professor Pierre de Vos, South Africa’s leading authority — in my opinion — on constitutional law, has written a blog which is published in the Sowetan today and which calls into question the relationship between former police commissioner Jackie Selebi and former president Thabo Mbeki, arising out of last week’s South Gauteng High Court conviction […]
Posted inNews/Politics
From ticket frippery to feuda thuggery
It is difficult to feel that sorry for the Democratic Alliance over the toilet wars – in which it has been smeared as indifferent to black dignity – because it walked doe-eyed into an entirely predictable political ambush.