Zillions of stars eyeball you from a quiet night sky as you dodge creeping goggas when using the toilet in Dilling, one of the 99 villages surrounding an equal number of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. I’m still undecided which was more surreal: using the roofless, hole-in-the-ground toilet in the dark or finding a Pepsi bottle cut […]
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Posted inLifestyle, Tech
Web 2.egO
I’ve been pondering, recently, the rise of narcissism as a disease of our world. Depression used to be the problem, everyone swallowing handfuls of Prozac and eating chocolate cake in their pyjamas. Now, I believe, fuelled by our inherent egomania and facilitated by (among many other things) Web 2.0 social-networking sites, a kind of global […]
Posted inLifestyle
Orgy on the road to Barberton?
So, did anyone else see the story of the Mpumalanga hitchhiker who was gang-raped by three women? Rape is a very serious matter — a gangrene that is eating away at the fabric of our society. There is nothing even remotely funny about it. Still, it is not too often that I read a story […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle, Tech
Evolution and endurance
Sometimes the things we need to learn most aren’t to be found in books, through transplanted wisdom, in lectures or by way of extraordinary mentor … there are some things not even Google can solve. The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted […]
Posted inBusiness, Lifestyle
Car whores
When in comes to selling cars, the badge obviously means a lot, but for buyers the nameplate often doesn’t tell the whole story. Take that good old South African favourite, the Toyota Hilux. How many of you lot know that in the 1980s Volkswagen assembled the pickup in Europe and sold it as the VW […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Sharia law an antidote to modernity or legislating misogyny?
When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, opened this can of worms, he must have cut his hand on the tin. His suggestion that sharia law might have a place within British law has left a gash in his support base so wide that it will need umpteen stitches just to stop the bleeding. […]
Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Satirists in desperate bid to keep Republicans in power
The US Republican Party isn’t just being kept in power by the military industrial complex, it’s being kept in power by satirists — what would they do without Bush, Huckabee or McCain? Last week Mitt Romney withdrew from the Republican race to replace George Bush as US President. Romney, who has a way of tightening […]
Posted inGeneral
Technology and identity
In an earlier piece — The changing face of identity — I reflected on the implications and possible influence, if not “effects”, of the social networking site, Facebook, on people’s sense of identity. At the time, Vincent Maher made an interesting comment on my piece, questioning what he saw as the implication that I was […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Racists, Eskom and why I don’t want to put the boot in
The wave of racist comments around Eskom and its — and by extension the government’s — incapacity to manage things has abated a little in my life. I liked the timing of one person’s comment — with the news of the blackouts, and Kenya’s troubles, someone turned to me and exclaimed about Africa’s inability to […]
Posted inSport
Get the Stofile out your ears; it has to be Oregan Hoskins
South Africa and the Springboks, despite the interference and politicking of Mike Stofile and his cabal, took a trip to France and emerged as the world champions. Who can ever forget those wonderful scenes as our president was hoisted shoulder-high by the second rugby team to unite a nation? A shining light (sans power failure) […]
Posted inLifestyle
Me — unplugged
I’ve been off the blog a few days now. Not because of Eskom (though Telkom is trying hard to regain its status as public enemy number one), not because of threatening emails, not because I haven’t had much to say (got plenty of both). Regular readers of my blog know I have major depressive disorder […]
Posted inLifestyle, Sport
The Windies, bad anthems and Shaun Pollock
Could it really be true, as Silwane and others have alluded to in the past, that music is a mind-altering substance and a direct cause of major changes of the course of history? I wonder, because it is entirely possible, isn’t it? I know what effect music has on me, the state of my soul […]