Circumstances prevented an earlier response to Ryland Fisher’s recent piece on racism — drawn from his book, Race. I am happy that he urges us to join in a conversation about race, a topic whose relevance has not diminished in post-apartheid South Africa, judging from media reports and articles. The major problem with his work […]
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Posted inLifestyle, News/Politics
Margaret Legum: Thought Leader extraordinaire
In the traffic this morning, I was saddened to learn of the death of Margaret Legum. Margaret was an advocate for new economics. Her columns in newspapers provided a rare view that we could be doing better, and a view completely “out of the box”. In fact, her book is titled It Does Not Have […]
Posted inBusiness
An hour with Discovery Holdings’s Adrian Gore
Many people may have heard of the founder and CEO of Discovery Holdings, Adrian Gore, but most will be hard pressed to tell you why they know the name. When you meet Gore you will understand why. Understated and down to earth, it is sometimes hard to believe that this is the genius behind it […]
Posted inLifestyle
Advice on the making of the world’s largest cupcake (please)
On December 15 this year I am attempting a Guinness world record: the world’s largest cupcake. Amazingly, nobody has thought to try it yet. I have all the necessary forms and documentation, and the Guinness World Records authorities have given me the go-ahead. It will be a vanilla cupcake with green icing, 1m in diameter, […]
Posted inMedia
Media ethics and guerrilla warfare
It has been with some interest that I have followed the ongoing discourse over the “us versus them” (mainstream media versus the blogosphere) issue, and its potential impact on the media landscape. Vincent Maher has pretty exhaustively tackled some of the issues in his paper Towards a Critical Media Studies Approach to the Blogosphere, and […]
Posted inNews/Politics, Sport
Transformation of rugby needs quotas
OK, let me be brave and write about something I am not supposed to know much about, namely rugby. (After all, I supported the Springboks because of JP Pietersen’s sexy legs.) These are the facts: only two of the regular players in the World Cup-winning Springbok rugby team are not lily-white. At the same time, […]
Posted inTech
How to roll out flawless software
A somewhat radical new way of thinking about software projects and how to manage customers through them. Introduction I have been doing software-development work for my entire career. That, to my horror, is somewhere close to 12 years now, which is starting to seem like a downright respectable length of time. In this time, I […]
Posted inNews/Politics, Sport
Wanted: A government that is not embarrassed by its people
It is nice to have a President who cares what the world thinks. It would be far nicer to have one who cares what the people of South Africa think. Thabo Mbeki’s desire to change the nickname of some national sports teams may seem like a frivolous diversion from our national challenges. In reality, it […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
Festival of what, precisely?
Publicists Total Exposure have announced a “Festival of Festivals”, showing at Ster-Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau theatres from November 2: “For two weeks in November, Johannesburg will be transformed into Cannes and Cape Town into Venice when some of the world’s most acclaimed new films will be screened at the first annual Festival of Festivals,” goes the […]
Posted inLifestyle
Can stupidity lead to the presidency?
Most white South Africans (and a logarithmically growing number of coconuts black people) believe that driving through “shady” places such as Soweto or Hillbrow has a 100% predictable outcome; lying in a pool of one’s blood with a bunch of “locals” performing a wild dance around one’s soon-to-be-corpse. That’s why people talk about “driving into […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Hlophe to blame for damage to judiciary
Who is to blame for the stress placed on the judiciary and the legal profession by the saga around Cape Judge President John Hlophe? The National Association for Democratic Lawyers (Nadel) seems to suggest that those who had criticised the original decision of the Judicial Services Commission not to pursue the complaint against Judge Hlophe […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Media dignitaries debating dignity
Racial dignity was a hot theme during the 2001 Human Rights Commission inquiry into media racism, and it emerged again at the SABC-South African National Editors’ Forum conference last week. Responding to my speech there, SABC CEO Dali Mpofu raised racial dignity as part of his opposition to the Sunday Times’s stories on Health Minister […]