General

It would seem that political leadership, suddenly, is being engineered in such a way to reveal the supposedly gentle, caring, uncorrupted and revolutionary face of a modern-day Jesus Christ. I don’t know what we should make of this development where men of God, mostly, who dress in the white collar are rushing to become the […]

I love my new teaching job. I get paid rather well, if we convert from the Chinese RMB to the SA rand. It is, after the ridiculously low tax which my agency has wangled, a reasonably decent income by Johannesburg north standards. That given, I only work just over fourteen hours a week at a […]

Reading through my last offering titled “Other people’s kids”, I realised that I had made an accidental point. You know, one I didn’t mean to make. I do that quite often and then when my readers point out that I made an excellent point, I pretend that I was aware of it all along. It’s […]

The word schlong is an offensive and “dirty” word in Yiddish which refers to the male reproductive organ and naturally, being Yiddish, most schlongs are circumcised. However, while circumcision is a common practice it is nonetheless varied in its implementation. Some get it done at a temple, some in a mountain cave, some in a […]

This blog seeks to cover new information in support of the thesis that Afrikaans is still imposed on learners at the expense of other African languages. This information is sub-divided into the following topics: scientific, statistical and factual realities to politics of language in education, proof of the author’s historical involvement in the struggle for […]

Depending on how you choose to look at things, prominent people who have declined nomination for the ANC parliamentary list are either snobbish or just hold utter contempt for the people’s choices. The two cases that come to mind are business magnate Cyril Ramaphosa and Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni. It may be difficult for […]

Few people have wondered how much it cost America to have its first … er, post-racial president. Not long ago I heard former cabinet minister Kader Asmal tell a public gathering that it cost $1-billion! Of course if that is true the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as the so-called first “black president” of the […]

Not too long ago a friend of mine was telling me how difficult it is to be a man, especially today. He says he has not had a lot of fun over the last 10 years or so because he has not yet become a multi-millionaire. Instead, he has been on a campaign trial trying […]

The big dream of physicists, Stefanie Schramm writes in Zeit Wissen, is to capture the universe in its totality in a formula that would fit on a T-shirt. This entails the attempt to unify theories in physics in such a manner that only one would remain: the “theory of everything”. More recently, however, researchers in […]

I’ve been catching up on my RSS feeds lately. A new thing for me. It has actually been a fairly disappointing experience. Well over half my RSS feeds are truncated, forcing you to click through to a site. I tend to browse most of my feeds using Google Reader mobile on the Nokia E71. This […]

In the late nineties I participated in the drafting of government policies including the policy: The White Paper on Affirmative Action for the Public Service. Part of the challenge in developing this work was the definition of the term “black”. As the White Paper now stands, the term black embraces Africans, coloureds and Indians. I […]

I have been away from South Africa in the belly of the beast so to speak. I have spent five weeks in the US and must admit I was relieved to go, not because I never enjoyed myself or that I missed my dog, I hated the media. I would yell curses at the TV […]