General

Yesterday a friend of mine implied that I was racist. It all started because I received this joke Click to enlarge on email. I’d seen it before, it gave me a little bit of a chuckle and so I forwarded it. To me it was no more than another joke about the jokes we have […]

You’ve heard them before. They’re the type of stats that you hear and shake your head in disbelief. For example, you’re more likely to die from eating shark than from being eaten by a shark. Can you believe it? If you can believe that what do the stats say for ordinary South Africans. What are […]

A young Scotsman, Wee Tom, disliked his nickname for obvious reasons. His schoolboy friends had seen him in the shower and he was very wee where matters are supposed to count. “Ha ha, Tom, when you get it up you’re going nowhere. She will fall asleep from boredom.” “Just wait and see,” retorted Wee Tom. […]

Whenever I find myself sadomasochistically desiring to feel spectacularly insignificant recourse to classical and continental philosophy usually does the trick. When I was younger staring blankly at the night sky and attempting to take in the immensity of it all usually did the trick, however it does not quite have the same effect when 90% […]

The last twenty years have seen the death of intellectual debate in South Africa. In the book The Poverty of Ideas, edited by William Mervin Gumede and Leslie Dikeni, a set of authors mourn this death by tackling head on the uncomfortable issue of the “devaluation of ideas in the public sphere in post-apartheid South […]

So what is my opinion of the iPad? Well first off, I do like it. Despite all its shortcomings, I think it might be a game-changing device. I read somewhere that the iPhone should be renamed the iPad Nano. And that might be a very apt description, seeing as the iPad is actually very similar […]

In my last post, I placed Cameron’s Avatar in the interpretive framework of eco-political thought and practice. One could approach it in different ways, too, of course, one of which is to look at its interesting configuration of the relation between myth and science, which is also related to what I said before about the […]

I find that far too many people crave social attention and desire praise for any little thing they do. This is a serious problem that perhaps reveals deep-seated feelings of inferiority and self-doubt. It has bred a culture of sucking up where people go out of their way to please or gain the approval of […]

Some of our campuses are on fire with predominantly black students running amok, again. The deep rumbles of discontent on these campuses like the Tshwane University of Technology, for instance, can easily be mistaken for a yearning for access to education and training, if you like. As much as this government is committed to opening […]

I never believed Sonono Khoza. Not because I thought that she deliberately lied about having sexual relations with President Jacob Zuma or because the issue of sleeping with a married man, especially a president, is trivial. I did not believe her because she seemed to be denying the obvious to the wrong people, at the […]

Source : Sapa /dbm/tk An email joke doing the rounds at the moment is titled “An incredible story of luck and inspiration for us all!” It shows a picture of an extremely ugly, fat man with a gorgeous blonde clinging to him. Let’s call them Simon and Gwen. Simon is a cultural stereotype of ugliness. […]

Almost every culture has a version of the story of a group of stuck-up youngsters who confront the village sage with a trick. It is the stuff of many a funeral night vigil speech. It also pops up in motivational talks and sometimes in serious lectures. The sage is wrinkled, old and female. Sometimes he […]