General

Again and again I’m struck by the massive uptake of mobile phones in the developing world. Exact figures are often hard to come by, but in South Africa it is estimated that 70% of the population has access to a mobile phone. Amongst the youth, that figure is easily 90%. The mobile phone is the […]

I’ve reached that age in my development (or deterioration, as the case may be) when I’m starting to look back at my past with a fair degree of nostalgia. Because hindsight is like looking through one’s past through a pair of rose-tinted glasses, there is a certain age we all reach when everything from twenty […]

Watching the Springboks take on Italy this past weekend was about as enjoyable as having my car stolen, or breaking a leg. The atrocious weather conditions certainly played a part — with Francois Steyn almost swimming his way over for the first try of the match — but the Italians should really shoulder most of […]

http://www.pmg.org.za/node/12721SA Rugby Super 14 franchise participation agreement: six franchises Last week Tuesday, SA Rugby’s president was caught on tape, flanked by his SA Rugby chairman, Mpumelelo Tshume, telling pork pies. Not one eeny-teeny porkie for which you might be inclined to say, “Oops, sorry,” but three whoppers and a most hurtful and disparaging remark on […]

Listening to a student telling me about being confronted in his home by a man wielding a butcher’s knife, then locking himself in his room and, with the man stomping about outside his bedroom door, kicking out the burglar proofing to escape (from his own home!), a thought that had occurred to me several times […]

With their 26-0 win over Six Nations bottom-enders Italy at Newlands on Saturday, the Springboks have now achieved their third consecutive victory under new coach Peter de Villiers — but we still are none the wiser about the much vaunted “revolutionary” or “new philosophy of play” he apparently has in mind for the world champions. […]

This was ugly rugby, played in atrocious conditions. Stop, start, stop. Horrible stuff. Not that I’m criticising the endeavour or willingness of the two sides to give it a go; far from it. Italy, as any side fielded by Nick Mallett, gave it their all and were willing to die for the cause (perhaps the […]

Patrick J Buchanan believes Britain lost its empire and acted as a catalyst for the Holocaust by engaging with Germany in two unnecessary world wars. He lays much of the blame at the doorstep of Winston Churchill, but for whom it could all have been so different. In an article for Human Events he alleges: […]

Spaced at finals a perpetual barrier, these are the voyages of the Southern Hemisphere rugby team the All Blacks – their 4 year mission ; to boldly choke like no team has choked before.. Captains Log Stardate 10/6/2007 We are currently on the surface of the planet Wales inhabited by those fecking Boyos, the setting […]

Yesterday we launched through a turgid Umzimvubu River at Port St Johns in search of bait balls. The sardine run this year has been good to our team, graciously offering up moments of drama that will undoubtedly make it into the final cut, but in the world of natural history documentaries, one can never have […]

With the release of Firefox 3 earlier this week, there was some anticipation around the QuirkStation that the SearchStatus download page (and thus www.quirk.biz) would see some increased traffic as users updated their extensions to be compatible with the new browser version. Firefox changes quite a bit with each new major release and so must […]

South Africa is really quite a virile rugby playing nation. We have spread our rugby spawn everywhere, well, certainly in those places that count in rugby. More importantly, it shows how superior South Africa’s strategy of “naaiamama” is to that of the New Zealand’s “whakapapa”. At Newlands, we have Peter de Villiers’ Springbok team playing […]