A Pattern Tub

Museum of Nature by Ilkka Halso

2007-04-05T10:47:00.000+01:00

2007-03-29T20:59:00.000+02:00

Del Villa Balbianello

2007-03-16T15:48:00.000+02:00

Four Lengthy Metafilter Threads

2007-03-15T10:12:00.000+02:00

.
How does one live a meaningful life in a world that one has come to believe is meaningless?

What do I need to do in daily life that I don't realize I need to be doing?

What are some modern ways in which to discover others' true character?

What does it feel like to get kicked in the balls?
.

Platteland

2007-03-02T08:22:00.000+02:00

Images from rural South Africa by Roger Ballen.

[via the internet]

Why Women Aren't Funny

2007-02-22T09:44:00.000+02:00

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh."

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

[article]

Clifford Ross Hurricane Series

2007-02-20T08:39:00.000+02:00

[site]

Tokyo

2007-02-14T20:33:00.000+02:00

High Dynamic Range shots of Tokyo nightscape

[Flickr]

Leaflitter

2007-01-11T13:36:00.000+02:00

Some images from the portfolio of photographer, Giles Revell.

2007-01-09T13:34:00.000+02:00

End Times

2006-11-01T15:55:00.000+02:00

Photographer Jill Greenberg has whipped up a storm of controversy with her new exhibition, End Times. The pictures in the show, for which she deliberately provoked tearful outbursts from children by taking away lollipops she had just given them, have been described by some as tantamount to child abuse.

Greenberg herself insists that the children had the sweets returned within 30 seconds, that no lasting harm has been done, and that her concern was to depict what she says reminded her of the "helplessness and anger I feel about America's current political and social situation."

[link]

Learned Opinion

2006-10-21T08:26:00.000+02:00

From an article i was reading on the Black Death:

The Black Death
Learned Opinion

The cause of the disease was a matter of concern to many. Popular opinion did view the plague as a scourge from God, for the times were indeed out of joint. This was mere vulgar opinion, however, and the learned knew better than to believe it. But what, then, was the source of the plague?

The pope sent to Paris to obtain the opinions of the medical faculty there in 1348. They studied the problem for a time and returned a report. The good professors opined that the disaster was caused by a particularly unfortunate conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius that had occurred in 1345. This conjunction cause hot, moist conditions, which cause the earth to exhale poisonous vapors.

The report went on to recommend steps to keep safe from the disease. This, in part, was their prescription:

No poultry should be eaten, no waterfowl, no pig, no old beef, altogether no fat meat. . . . It is injurious to sleep during the daytime. . . . Fish should not be eaten, too much exercise may be injurious . . . and nothing should be cooked in rainwater. Olive oil with food is deadly. . . . Bathing is dangerous. . . .

In time, other writings appeared from the pens of educated men on the best ways to avoid the plague. From Italy came this advice:

In the first instance, no man should think of death. . . . Nothing should distress him, but all his thoughts should be directed to pleasing, agreeable and delicious things. . . . Beautiful landscapes, fine gardens should be visited, particularly when aromatic plants are flowering. . . . Listening to beautiful, melodious songs is wholesome. . . . The contemplating of gold and silver and other precious stones is comforting to the heart.

And then there is the Plague doctor, to me a strangely archetypal image

Nieves Books (Recursive Art)

2006-10-20T10:39:00.000+02:00

[Nieves Books]

Victorian Post-Mortem Photography

2006-10-20T10:10:00.000+02:00

Photographs of a deceased loved one served as substitutes and reminders of the loss. Families who could not afford to commission painted portraits could arrange for a photograph to be taken cheaply and quickly after a death. This was especially important where no photograph already existed. The invention of the Carte de Visite, which enabled multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that images could be sent to distant relatives. The deceased was commonly represented as though they were peacefully sleeping rather than dead, although at other times the body was posed to look alive.

[Link via Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society]

Papa Song's

2006-10-19T18:42:00.000+02:00

I found this scary photo of Canal Walk's food court on Flickr. It was taken using high dynamic range technology.

People like Kortbroek

2006-10-17T19:12:00.000+02:00

Source

Marthinus Van Schalkwyk is well known as the last leader of the National Party, before it imploded, pathetically, into the ANC. Below follows a short biography of the man who betrayed his colleagues, his constituents, the Afrikaner people and democracy in

South Africa

. He chose his own lowly interests over those of the people he promised to protect. He sold out his own kin. There is no lower thing.

As a young man Marthinus Van Schalkwyk had been chairman and a founding member of an organisation called “Jeugkrag”, which painted itself as an organization for Afrikaner youth disenchanted with the Establishment. Jeugkrag broke ranks with the NP and had even met the exiled ANC. It would later emerge, however, that while he was leading his supposedly independent youth movement, he was securing secret state funding for it. And, without the knowledge of fellow Jeugkrag leaders, he himself was on the government payroll. He was working as a double agent from the start, lying to his colleagues. If I had worked with this guy I would have punched him in the throat. A man with no principles and even less conviction.

In 1990, Van Schalkwyk was doing all he could to tie himself to De Klerk – then leader of the NP and President of South Africa, and by 1997 he had management to wiggle his way to the top of the shitpile. “Kortbroek” – as was his nickname amongst hardliners because of his sycophantic subservience - was chosen as leader of the NP for the 1999 general elections. At this time the National Party (or to be precise, the NNP at that stage) had the stated goal of being meaningful opposition to the ANC Leviathan.

There was a popular urge for such a situation, and the NP was more successful than expected. And on an even more positive note, it had formed an alliance with the Democratic Party in 2000, which effectively gave them control over the Western Cape Province.

More than a million ordinary South Africans had put their trust in Marthinus to do as he promised. The people tasked him, gave him the mandate, to try keep the corruption inherent in one-party systems at bay. Yet in 2001 Marthinus had his National Party break off from the Alliance, and entered into talks with the ANC. The discussions first lead to a ‘cooperation agreement’ between the ANC and the NP, but soon events took a more fundamentally tragic turn. The ANC offered Marthinus a ministerial position and in return for aligning the NP completely with the ANC. Marthinus took the miserly whore-money, disenfranchised a million citizens, and handed the hard won Western Cape over to the ANC. In August 2004 it was announced that Van Schalkwyk was disbanding the NP and would afterwards become a member of the ANC.

This was the ANC’s grandest moment. How they must have chuckled.

The only opposition they faced was effectively destroyed. The NP officially disbanded in April 2005, as Marthinus went from stating in 2003 that the ANC was "failing the poor" and had abandoned "principles like unity, equality and patriotism that have nothing to do with skin color", to bleating at the official disbandment of the NP that he “would personally encourage other NP leaders and members to join the ANC”. He effectively told his constituents, half a million people, to go to hell. He made the country less democratic, less just. He made our society just a little more cynical, and for that the name of Marthinus van Schalkwyk should go down as a stain on this country’s history. May his children shame him thusly.

Another Short Story

2006-10-13T13:32:00.000+02:00

Guts by Chuck Palahniuk

If you're in the least bit squemish, dont read this.

Portraits of the stars

2006-10-11T09:03:00.000+02:00

From a fascinating interview with star photographer Platon on what he's learned from his subjects.

When Platon's exuberance got the better of him and he asked if Al Pacino could recreate the late scene from The Godfather II where he's in the garden...Pacino leaned forward, touched him on the knee, and went, shhhhhh. Then he took on Michael Corleone for about 30 seconds. "I'm the only person to photograph Pacino as Michael Corleone," Platon says proudly.

On Keanu Reeves: "I'm not sure if this guy's really shy or really dim." He incessantly asked Platon, "What's my motivation?"

"No sex please, we're British," is apparently a well-known bit of Brit self-deprecation that Platon felt related to the following story about shooting Monica Bellucci, who he describes as one of the three sexiest women alive. He was in the dressing room talking with her before the shoot and mid-conversation she drops her towel and asks her gorgeous Italian assistants to rub baby oil "all over her curves" so she could slide into the skin-tight dress she'd chosen. "She knew exactly what she was doing," Platon insists. At the end of the shoot he asked to have a photo shot with her for his scrapbook, and, getting a little cheeky and no doubt intoxicated by her closeness he warned her, "I'm a married man." She whispered in his ear ("I can still feel her warm breath on my neck"), "Don't worry darling, I'm married too."

Benicio Del Toro: "No one touches the hair."

Platon on Matt Damon, who is "really nice, but a little square": "I had to help him look cooler than he really was."

On Christopher Walken, in the understatement of the night: "Now this guy is weird." Walken showed up for a shoot at Platon's house an hour early (unprecedented), alone (un-heard-of), and wearing black elastic pants pulled up to his armpits (what do you expect). He walked through the studio, straight into Platon's kitchen and started going through the cabinets. Platon, a little confused, asked him if he was hungry, and could he get him something to eat? "No," Walken replied, and kept opening cabinet doors. His advice on life? "It helps if you drink." The only way he would let Platon shoot his portrait? "You're going to say 'Chris' and I'm going to look at you and then I'm going to look away." "We did that for two hours," Platon says.

What's the best novel in the past 25 years?

2006-10-10T14:32:00.000+02:00

England's Guardian newspaper asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005. These are the results:

First place:
Disgrace (1999) - JM Coetzee

Second place:
Money (1984) - Martin Amis

Joint third place:
Earthly Powers (1980) - Anthony Burgess
& Atonement (2001) - Ian McEwan

The full list can be found here.

The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka

2006-10-10T08:58:00.000+02:00

[www.yerka.pl/]

Two websites you need to know about

2006-10-08T14:43:00.000+02:00

Check out The Hype Machine and Elbo.ws -

Both these sites track a variety of MP3 blogs. If a post contains MP3 links, each adds those links to its searchable database. In other words, if you are looking for a song, try searching for it on The Hype Machine and elbo.ws. If it’s floating out there, you can find it in here.

For practice check out “Young Folks” by Peter Bjorn and John. I just searched for it on The Hype Machine and here it is.

God I love the internet.

Death row

2006-10-08T02:24:00.000+02:00

For the optimist, a good way to start a discussion is to ask: "What would you do if you won a million dollars?" The pessimist finds it more interesting to examine the facts about what the lucky winners actually do with their million bucks. A refreshing alternative is to reflect on how you would spend your last hours on death row. The Ohio Death row logs make for interesting reading.

SA Census 2001 and 2006

2006-10-07T20:00:00.000+02:00

some tables from SA Census 2001 and 2006

South Park Republican

2006-10-06T13:51:00.000+02:00

I never fully appreciated how influential Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park is:

From Wikipedia:

The term "South Park Republican" has thus become popular among a handful of pundits to describe young Americans who interpret the show's values as being parallel to their cause. They see themselves as being more libertarian and far less puritanical than many other conservative groups (e.g. the religious right). Trey and Matt say they are extremely grateful for the 15 half-hours of airtime that Comedy Central annually affords them because it gives them a "bullhorn to yell at America." The phrase, "You know? I've learned something today..." is the trademark line, used in nearly every episode, to outline the South Park solution to the current moral crisis. South Park Republicans empathize with the characters' consideration of moral guidelines in their attempts to explain their surroundings and are extremely likely to support the "children's" decisions.

Trey Parker, quoted in the same Wikipedia entry:

And it comes from an honest belief we have, which is... George Bush doesn't know what's going on. Michael Moore does not know what's going on. And Alec Baldwin definitely does not know what's going on. Basically, this shit is gigantically complicated.

Top SA journalist resolves the gay marriage conundrum once and for all

2006-10-06T10:06:00.000+02:00

Jon Qwelane, columnist for News24 and staunch Zuma supporter and defender, offers this brilliant, piercing argument against same-sex marriages.

You have to read it to believe it.

Podcast roundup

2006-10-05T17:30:00.000+02:00

For explorations in thought and science, check out the University of Bath public lectures series. Not all of them are great, but I do recommend The Corpse is the New Porn Star in Pop Culture
and Why Does a Ball Bounce?

I have not listened to them all yet because I found the Berkley University podcast archive, with courses from History of Information to General Biology. I have listened to the first few lectures of Foundations of American Cyberculture, perfect for driving to work on Mondays (Don't download the first class, it's all admin).

Short short story

2006-10-05T16:33:00.000+02:00

I quite like this short story, Memories of the Decadence, by Hari Kunzru. You can read it on his website here.

House of Meetings

2006-10-04T11:03:00.000+02:00

"For all its incidental comic felicities, a reader could finish reading Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003) feeling that too much had been sacrificed to the jokes; it is not that Amis’s distinctive gifts have ever been self-effacing ones, but there were moments in that book when the world was being just too deliberately shrunk to fit the satire’s demands. Darius the “seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist” couldn’t be six-foot-eleven, or indeed five-foot-six, just as Clint Smoker had to live in the geographically impractical location of Foulness – not in the interests of plot or character, but in order to feed the punchline. To move from such Technicolor knock-about to the sombre grey-scale in which House of Meetings lives is to encounter an almost completely different author, to negotiate a shift between moral worlds as well as palettes."

[full TLS review]

Winnie Mandela: Putting the “con” back in “icon”

2006-10-02T09:36:00.000+02:00

Many people in South Africa view Winnie Mandela as a great South African. She is revered wherever she goes as a struggler against oppression and a mother of the nation.

When it comes to such large characters it is sometimes hard to distinguish fact from fiction, the profound from the everyday and the sordid. Thus, in honor of icons and mortals alike, I have written a short biopic of Winnie, with the aim of bringing to the surface the person behind the personage.

Winnie Madikizela was born in either 1934 or 1936, depending who you ask. Her father was a minister in the Transkei in the 1950s, and despite restrictions on the education of blacks during Apartheid, her wealthy background allowed her to escape many of the hardships of the period; she earned a degree in social work from the Jan Hofmeyer School in Johannesburg, and several years later earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of Witwatersrand. Yet it was during her time as a social worker that she became, in her own words, “politicized’. To quote from the ANC’s web page on Winnie:

”It was while working as the first black medical social worker at Baragwanath Hospital that I started to become politicized" says Mandela. "I started to realize the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live, the appalling conditions created by the inequalities of the system. Above all, I became politically conscious through the research I had carried out in Alexandra Township to establish the rate of infantile [sic] mortality - it was 10 deaths in every 1,000 births."

(As an aside, infant mortality under the ANC government today is 62 per every 1,000 births – six times the rate of 1950s Apartheid South Africa.)

By 1958, and coinciding with her first detention, Winnie Mandela’s education and commitment to the struggle saw her rise to power within the ANC ranks, becoming chairperson of the Orlando West branch of both the ANC and the ANC Women’s League. It was, however, her husband Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment for terrorism in 1962 that sealed her fate as a living symbol of the struggle against Apartheid.

Over the next thirty years, Winnie was part of many organized campaigns against Apartheid. She was also imprisoned many times herself, the longest having been 18 months in solitary confinement in Pretoria Central Prison in 1969, awaiting trail under the Suppression of Communism Act. After initially being found guilty, Mandela and the other accused were discharged on appeal. In May 1977 Winnie Mandela was internally exiled to the town of Brandfort for nine years. Here her house was bombed twice by the Apartheid government.

On release from Brandfort in 1985, Winnie returned to her home in Soweto. During her absence, 600-plus groups had allied together as a surrogate ANC under the title of the United Democratic Front (UDF). As the ANC was banned, the UDF filled the vacuum and became an umbrella organization for all groups opposing Apartheid and supporting a non-racial South Africa. Winnie decided to have nothing to do with the UDF, mainly because she was jealous of its support, and formed her own personal vigilante group - the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC), comprising of nothing more than a group of her personal bodyguards. Reports of their brutality were commonplace in Soweto.

Her reputation was further damaged by what many considered her sometimes bloodthirsty rhetoric, the most noteworthy example of this being a speech she gave in Munsieville in 1985, where she endorsed the practice of necklacing in the struggle to end Apartheid. She said, "with our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country".

"Necklacing," typically carried out by members and supporters of the ANC, consisted of binding a black adversary hand and foot, draping gasoline-filled tires around legs, midriff, and neck, and setting the victim ablaze. Often, children were forced to witness their parents' agonizing deaths.

In August 1990, after the unbanning of the ANC by the National Party/Apartheid government, Winnie was appointed head of the Welfare Department of the ANC, in charge of repatriating exiles. Welfare NGOs petitioned the ANC against her appointment. Even the ANC National Executive Committee tried to remove her. But Nelson Mandela, on his way to becoming the first president of the new South Africa, personally blocked these attempts.

In 1991, Winnie Mandela was found to be complicit in the brutal killing of a 14-year-old boy named "Stompie" Seipei in 1989. Stompie, it emerged, was a pawn in an elaborate sting by Winnie to ensnare a popular white Methodist minister, Paul Verryn, in a homosexual honey-trap. Verryn was a radical with an intrepid record of opposition to Apartheid, who sheltered youths on the run from the police. Winnie was jealous - her white rival had begun attracting more funds from abroad for community projects than her football club. Winnie kidnapped Stompie and, with young men from her club, beat him to near death when he denied he had ever been touched by Verryn.

Stompie’s body was found on waste ground near Winnie's home, his throat and his head caved in.

Winnie Mandela was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for kidnapping and assaulting Stompie. In an unprecedented and widely mocked appeal-court judgment at the time, her jail sentence then was reduced to a R15,000 fine. Her alibi, which Chief Justice Michael Corbett said persuaded him to suspend her jail sentence, was subsequently proved to be a lie at a 1997 hearing of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her two co-accused went to prison.

Then in 1992 she was accused of misappropriating funds from her department. Nelson Mandela, in the hope of saving face and ensuring he was seen to be politically and morally strong enough to steer the country from the brink of civil war, distanced himself from Winnie.

In 1994 she was elected as ANC MP and became a junior minister, but in 1995, she was sacked from her post because, among other things, she had criticized the government's approach to social reform, made an unauthorized trip abroad, split the ranks of the African National Congress' Women's League and has also been accused by police of bribe-taking and influence-peddling. In 1996 President Mandela divorced her on grounds of adultery, and at the court hearing neither she nor her lawyers contested Mandela's assertions of her "brazen infidelity" following his 1990 release from 27 years of political imprisonment.

In 1997, she was summoned before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), on allegations that she was involved in at least 18 human rights abuses, including eight murders during the Apartheid years. One of her former bodyguards, a Mr. Jerry Richardson, testified in front of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the TRC panel that he had killed Stompie "like a goat" with a pair of garden shears on the orders of Winnie Mandela. He has also admitted killing three other suspected "impimpis" (police informers) on Winnie's orders.

It should also be noted that Mr. Richardson had nothing to loose: Richardson is serving life in prison for murdering Stompie and a policeman in an unconnected case.

By 2000 Winnie Mandela had become a detestable within the ANC. Not only did she not toe the party line, but she openly criticized the policies of President Thabo Mbeki. This conflict culminated in the "War of Winnie's Hat", an unseemly clash between Mbeki and Winnie Mandela when he showed his ire at her late arrival at a party function in June 2001 by knocking her hat off.

In July 2002 Winnie Mandela was charged with 85 counts of fraud and theft involving more than a million rand. Her crime was to have applied for multiple bank loans at favourable rates in the names of fictitious members of the ANC Women’s League, of which Winnie was president at the time of the fraud.

On April 24, 2003, she was found guilty on 43 counts of fraud and 25 of theft, and her broker, Addy Moolman, was convicted on 58 counts of fraud and 25 of theft. Winnie Mandela was sentenced to five years imprisonment on convictions for theft and fraud. In a change of tactics, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela pleaded that she had defrauded the money on behalf of poor women. But the magistrate, observing that the cheap loans had ended up in Winnie’s personal bank account, said: "You are no Robin Hood. The message has to be sent out that this type of behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, no matter who the transgressor.”

Yet even with a mountain of evidence against her, Winnie escaped doing a day of prison time when an appeal judge upheld her prison sentence on 43 convictions of fraud, but suspended it for five years.

When the Iraq War started, Winnie once again showed her selflessness and courageous spirit by volunteering to be a “human shield”. The subheading on the WorldNet daily article read: “Nelson's ex-wife, convicted of helping murder child, wants to protect Iraqi kids”.

More recently, Parliament’s General Assembly fined her in 2003 for failing to disclose her earnings and gifts. Winnie, who just turned 70, seems to be far from an end. With million still celebrating this thief, I hope that she will disappear into the hollow emptiness of legend, before the actual Winnie does any more harm.

In the final analysis, who was the hero: Winnie, or her child victim Stompie?

And where is his justice, his freedom?

Herpes new year!

2006-09-30T18:46:00.000+02:00

Single with a STD? Don't despair, here's your chance to share your experiences with "hundreds of thousands". Continue to be an active member of the community and give something back.

http://www.positivesingles.com/?tid=122

Dr Zuma, or: Why I learnt to stop worrying and love the guy

2006-09-29T11:00:00.000+02:00

Just how dumb exactly is the average South African? A previous patterntub entry gave me an inkling of this via the rather abstract notion of IQ: the average IQ in SA is allegedly 72. But what does this really mean? If your majors at school weren't psychology and statistics, you can deduct little beyond "my countrymen are dumb as dirt".

There are subtle clues all over the place. The trick is to force yourself to recognize them. This must only be attempted by those immune to depression or who are in any case already depressed. If you hear a voice in your head telling you not to open up to this reality, ignore it, it’s just Your Sanity speaking. What has he done for you lately?

One telling example is a regular etv (1 of 4 public networks in SA) “competition” in which the viewer is given "cryptic" clues and must sms (text) the answer to some literally unforgettable number.

The format for all of these questions is always exactly the same: A short but ridiculously useful description of what this person does, a glorious full colour 5 megapixel photo, and a thinly disguised anagram of the persons name. So far, my personal favourite of these weekly mindbenders is:

She’s the popular host of a talk show and one of the richest women in the world:

ORAPH

This is nothing less than downright insulting. But it is only insulting if you have the mental faculty to feel insulted by it, and I don’t think etv is in the business of insulting people.

I’m patiently waiting for this one to come up:

He’s the controversial creator of the universe and doesn’t really exist:

DOG

It can only be a matter of time.

Yes, I now it’s supposed to be easy, but really. The questions are designed to make the viewer feel that she is playing a game and that she is really clever for figuring out the answer, and therefore has a sporting chance to win the latest piece of technological junk that will be obsolete just about the moment it arrives in the mail. etv obviously believes that these questions are sufficiently taxing for the average television and mobile phone owning South African to be enticed into throwing R2 down the drain. And they should know, they only need to count the number of sms’s received.

The scariest thing: the TV and mobile phone owners hardly constitute SA’s most ignorant demographic. No wait, the scariest thing surely has to be that these are the more priveleged among the people who vote in all matters deemed important enough to vote on. You know when we refer to the voice of the people? That’s them. Well, the people have spoken to etv, and they are saying that they are ignorant and gullible. They insist. This is why a guy that purports to wash away HIV in the shower after rape I mean sex is on his merry way to being our next president. (Unrelated, I hear a shower does wonders for pepper spray as well). If you’re not sure who I’m talking about, here’s a clue:

He’s a corrupt moron and one of the most loved statesmen in South Africa:

ZACOB JUMA

Thundermugs

2006-09-28T08:35:00.000+02:00

Some (wonderful) images of 19th century chamberpots from the book Chambers of Delight.

[Via The Nonist]

The Aerial Photography of Yann Arthus-Bertrand

2006-09-27T10:19:00.000+02:00

My favourite photographer, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, has put more than a thousand photos from across the world onto his website. All of them downloadable as wallpapers. Good times.
[link]

Foreign Office

2006-09-26T15:46:00.000+02:00

Slate has an essay comparing and contrasting four different versions of The Office. In addition to the U.K. and U.S. versions, both France (Le Bureau) and Germany (Stromberg) have produced their own versions of the show.

The Naked Face

2006-09-26T12:04:00.000+02:00

The two men, protégé and mentor, sat at the back of the room, as faces flickered across the screen. Ekman had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and pointed to the faces of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God! I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?' " Ekman recalls. "And he went up to the screen and, while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, "I've got to unpack the face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see it, maybe everyone else could, too."

From Malcolm Gladwell's The Naked Face, an article about what people see when we look at each other and how some have taken that skill to a seemingly super-human level.

2006-09-19T11:31:00.000+02:00

Short piece detailing how Brian Eno composed the Windows 95 startup sound.

Transcript of Brian Eno discussing Generative Music at the Imagination Conference, 1996.

Kings of Africa

2006-09-14T11:34:00.000+02:00

[HALIDOU SALIL, amido of Bibemi]

"There are still several hundred monarchs on this continent. While some amongst them have been relegated to the level of touristic curiousities, others still maintain significant traditional and spiritual power. Born of dynasties which marked the history of Africa until the twentieth century, these kings are the source of underground power with which "modern governments" have to co-exist. Contrary to the Indian Maharajas, they have survived the upheavals of history, and evolve in a parallel world but one which is very real."
.
From Daniel Laine 's online photograpy exhibition, Kings of Africa.

[HADJ MAMADOU KABIR USMAN, Emir of Katsina]

[GOODWILL ZWELETHINI, King of Zulu]

[SALOMON IGBINOGHODUA, Oba Erediauwa of Bénin]

[Via Spy's Spice]

Bedtime Stories by Thom Yorke

2006-09-13T14:40:00.000+02:00

The Happy Little Bunny
Once there was a little bunny who had a little furry tail and a little shiny nose. But the electrodeath cloud of commerce strangled it and its foxhole was converted to a parking lot, a parking lot, a parking lot. Ample parking asphalted over bunny bones. Everyone everyone everyone get in.

Hannah and Gunther
Hannah and her brother Gunther lived in a happy wooden house at the end of a windy road by the forest. Chomping tree-eating machines grinding, halting, grinding the forest destroyed the trees—birches branches Branford—to make end tables and politician luncheon plates, spin spin spin. I can't feel my legs anymore.

Whoopsie the Clumsy Dragon
In the dragon family in the enchanted cave, there lived Mother, Father, Brother, and Whoopsie. Whoopsie tried to be like the other dragons, but anytime he tried to help he ended up making a mess. Diplomats destroy the ozone and waiting, wailing. Crawl in the hole, leap the banshee, and eat the sunlight. Tonight, tomorrow, why bother? Another. Another. I'm a grown monkey wastechain.

Everybody Enjoys Manners!
When we eat, it's fun to have our manners eat with us! Wear your napkin on your lap and don't hit your sister, even if she throws peas at you. Reason your reasons, razors shave the planet clean. Blood fills the rivers, clogs the tubes. I want to die, eat your ice cream.

By David Hart at McSweeneys.

Looking for reliable information? (or: Women and Maths)

2006-09-02T11:25:00.000+01:00

The Pew Research Center is a fantastic source of data on every topic imaginable, and according to Russel Brown (a journalist for the NZ Listener), this is a reputable establishment. It describes itself as ‘a nonpartisan "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It does so by conducting public opinion polling and social science research; by reporting news and analyzing news coverage; and by holding forums and briefings.’ There is something for everyone (except that women might struggle to interpret the numbers). Here's a study that caught my attention:

Women Can't Do Math...Or Can They?
by Richard MorinPew Research CenterAugust 31, 2006

Strange but true: Women score much lower on math tests if they are first asked unrelated questions about gender issues. The phenomenon is known as "stereotype threat" -- a kind of performance anxiety discovered in 1995 when psychologists found that black students at Stanford University did significantly worse on intelligence tests if they were first asked to identify their race on the test form.

Since then, dozens of other experiments have confirmed that subtly cuing women, minorities and other stigmatized groups to think subconsciously about their gender or race causes them do poorly in areas where the general stereotype suggests they are weak.

University of Texas psychologist Matthew S. McGlone wondered if there wasn't another side of the story. What if you prompted people to think about their strengths rather than their stereotypical weaknesses -- would that be enough to improve performance in areas where they weren't supposed to do well?

In a novel set of experiments, McGlone, working with Joshua Aronson of New York University, found that the answer is yes. "The idea that something is immutable due to some biological factor can be trumped," McGlone said.

Are you an Occamist?

2006-08-30T14:50:00.000+01:00

Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The remark was meant as a put-down, a sort of "Yeah, what do you know?" To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth." Quine was an Occamist.

On the other hand, I have heard that in an episode of The X-Files, Fox Mulder dismisses Occam's razor by renaming it Occam's Principle of Unimaginative Thinking. Let a thousand paranormal and pseudoscientific flowers bloom. Mulder is an Anti-Occamist.

Interesting post on Occam's Razor here.

Moderation

2006-08-28T23:05:00.000+01:00

Like so many others I was born with an addictive personality. My long list of addictions include, but are not limited to, Imperial Mints, throat lozenges, food in general, B&H Infinite Lights, computer games, Egoli: Place of Gold. Admittedly, I am using the term ‘addiction’ rather loosely to refer to cases where one feels compelled to repeatedly engage in an activity to the detriment of one’s overall well-being. (What is the difference between an addiction and a bad habit?)

So far my most bizarre addiction has been to bran flakes. It started during the summer holidays, just after I finished high school and just before I was to go to University in order to pursue Higher Learning. My sisters, who have already spent a year at this noble institution, took it upon themselves to prepare me for the new chapter in my life (as good sisters do). So they took me to De Akker, that famous cockroach-infested pub in Stellenbosch, where I was to spend most of my free time over the next ten years. After a Tassies and Black Label-inspired performance my sisters realised that I could be a Big Hit at University. If only I would lose weight. (For some reason one has to be small to be a big.)

I have always wanted to be popular, so I decided to give it a go (I mean, imagine that, being a big hit!). They put me on The Shape Diet. You get to drink three delicious milkshakes instead of your three daily meals, plus all the bran you can eat. The Shape milkshake was a good start to the day, believe you me. Banana was my favourite. Then strawberry for lunch, and vanilla for dinner. Unfortunately, in addition I also ate some bread with Trim mayonnaise, lots of fruit (how can that be bad?), and various other secret scraps on the side. My sisters confiscated the Shape after one caught me eating Christmas cake with all the icing. There were some angry words (“The stuff’s expensive, you know”) and that was the end of it. That was the last diet I ever went on, for I realised I did not possess the virtue of moderation and was destined to be chubby.

But somehow I found myself eating more and more bran and going to University completely hooked on the stuff. Bran is the perfect food: zero calories, 100% fibre, and cheaper than chips (about R2,50 for 1,5 kg, that’s about a week’s supply if you're a heavy user). It is probably also the most innocuous substance one can possibly abuse. Some would say it is impossible to abuse bran, but I would point out to them the unpleasant digestive effects of bran overdose. Your grandmother was right when she said ‘everything in moderation’.

Mastering the art of consuming bran requires considerable skill. The spoonful of bran must enter the mouth without touching anything, and be carefully placed on the tongue, then tipped over to leave a tidy little heap on the tongue. Then the mouth is closed, leaving the bran to soak, slowly, and only then can it be chewed and swallowed. This is the only way to eat bran. Any other way leads to choking when bran flakes are accidentally inhaled into the lungs.

There was a permanent cup of bran on my green desk. There was also bran all over my desk, and on my half of the floor. It was all over my bed where I often slouched to study some ancient text. Bran can be messy because if you breathe out while transporting it to your eagerly awaiting mouth, it will fly everywhere. It seems that bran is a particularly helpful crutch when it comes to studying for tests and exams, or when you’ve missed lunch at the residence and were to cheap or lazy to buy something decent to eat.

Then, one Sunday, in the middle of the mid-year exams, I ran out of bran. This was a problem. Some might call it a disaster. I could not concentrate on my work. In those days everything was closed on Sundays. I was not hopeful, but I had to try, and so the long walk began from the ‘dames koshuise’ (lady’s residence) to every café in town. By some miracle I finally found a bag of bran at a café close to the station, a very long way from the residence. Then there was the walk back, and all the while I was looking out for a private spot, a public toilet, perhaps, or some dark alley. It was more than I could take. I ended up on a bench in the Botanical Gardens, tearing open that bag of bran and devouring it wildly, the delicate art of bran consumption all forgotten. At that moment I realised: I must never experiment with drugs.

For those of you who are concerned about my mental health, let me assure you that I have worked through my issues and am no longer the slave of bran. But the point I want to make is this: The problem with having an addictive personality is that one can get addicted to anything, so one must always watch your step. The advantage of having an addictive personality is that one can become addicted to anything, so it might as well be bran.

For the kids

2006-08-25T08:53:00.000+01:00

The 20 most loathsome South Africans: Number 17: The Real Realist

2006-08-25T00:14:00.000+01:00

The real realist is the owner of a blog called “Why South Africa is crap”. It is supposedly dedicated to “revealing the truth about the failed South African 'Rainbow' nation and monitoring its decline into a Turd World Hellhole.”

In principle there is obviously nothing wrong with trying to dig up news that is for whatever reason not properly covered by the media. However, my problem with this guy and his blog already starts to manifest itself in, and is very well summed up by, his pseudonym, the name of the blog, and the nomenclature in his blog motto.

Firstly, his carefully chosen name. He’s not just a realist. He’s not even a real realist. He is nothing less than “the real realist”. Only he knows the “real” truth, he says.

Secondly, the name of the blog. He’s not saying that he feels South Africa is less than perfect. He doesn’t even stop at saying that to him South Africa is crap. He is stating that South Africa is crap as an objective fact. If you don’t think SA is crap, he says, you are simply delusional. He explicitly or implicitly makes it clear in every second post that he has completely given up on SA, and any person that suggests that they do not agree with him 100%, is thumped into the ground by His Greatness and his cronies. I don’t need anyone with such a childish, arrogant, stupid name telling me how to feel about anything.

Thirdly, the blog motto. The fatalistic “failed” I can handle, but the “Turd World Hellhole” is too much. Because it doesn’t just stop there, oh no. Any native of a poorish country is referred to as a “Turd Worlder”, by the Almighty Realist as well as his disciples. Certain human beings are said to be human excrement. What’s more, any non-white South African is referred to as a “New South African”. This guy categorizes on a level of detail only marginally superior to a newborn who is still coming to terms with the fact the universe can be divided into more than just himself and the rest.

He’s not even a good writer: his foremost tool in his comeback armour is the exclamation mark. That really is just about all he has to offer. It’s not unusual for him to refute a perfectly good argument with something like “Now you are talking complete bollocks! That’s hilarious! Your comments are stupid!” Just that, nothing else. The frustrating thing is that it is a very effective strategy if you’re trying to convince an idiotic readership. Most of them are simply angry, stupid racists that can’t get over the fact that a white skin no longer guarantees them the American Dream. They can’t think for themselves, so they assume that the odd comment expressing anything on the sane side of the Apocalypse must be obviously stupid if there are more than three exclamation marks in the Almighty Realist’s reply.

Case in point:

His Holiness The Real Realist misquoted a few numbers (a 50% weakening of the rand becomes 100%) regarding the ZAR/USD exchange rate, and promptly proclaimed with the conviction of a four year old with a new Superman costume jumping of fa roof: “I think I’m starting to see a pattern here”. Like he's understating an obvious fact.
He claims that since 1994 things have basically been going to shit, according to the numbers. The real truth is that there isn’t a pattern by a long shot, which I’ll demonstrate below. I tried to protest, but only got a relentless bombardment of exclamation marks in return.

The graphs below show some of SA’s most important vital statistics (excuse the horrible layout, I blame www.blogger.com). I don’t pretend to be an economist, but there is no pattern of regression in these numbers. The red parts of the graphs show SA’s progress since 1994 (when the new government was inaugurated), the black parts everything that happened between 1960 and 1994. (There is nothing special about the starting date, that is simply as far back as the data at my disposal goes.)

For the more technically inclined, the scales on the vertical axes are all logarithmic (the exact numbers are irrelevant), just to make interpretation more intuitive, and the horisintal axes denote the date. The straight line shows the trend in the data pre-1994, and extrapolates it to 2006. In simple terms: the straight line determines whether SA has made better or worse progress since 1994 (than between 1960 and 1994).

As you can see below, yes, the rand has weakened at a slightly quicker pace than it did in the Apartheid days. But if there’s any pattern, it’s a very positive one: the rand stood at something like R14 per dollar a few years ago, and now it’s at about R7. A remarkable recovery.

As the other graphs show, however, SA’s GDP growth and share markets (the ALSI represents about 99% of the SA equity markets) have accelerated, and inflation has decelerated since 1994.

No-one can deny SA has a lot of problems and faces a lot of challenges, and who knows where we’ll be in 10 years’ time, but the last thing we need is some idiot giving tens of thousands of us the impression that we’ve regressed in areas that we’ve actually made some very good progress, against all the odds.

dead people Mensa wishes had been members

2006-08-23T10:17:00.001+01:00

Mensa must be the dumbest smart people on the face of this earth.

Case in point:

Since 1991, Mensa America has had the arrogance to induct defenceless dead people into its so called “Hall of Fame” (I’m sure these geniuses got this from baseball or something. America must be the only country in the world where artistic and intellectual pursuits imitate sports). According to wikipedia, they have thus far claimed the scalps of 14 famous intellectuals that have crossed over to the dead side:

· Nicolas Copernicus, Inducted 1991
· Marie Sklodowska Curie, Inducted 2005
· Charles Darwin, Inducted 1991
· Leonardo Da Vinci, Inducted 1990
· Thomas Edison, Inducted 2003
· Albert Einstein, Inducted 1990
· Euclid, Inducted 2005
· Benjamin Franklin, Inducted 1990
· Galileo Galilei, Inducted 1991
· Isaac Newton, Inducted 1990
· Louis Pasteur, Inducted 2005
· William Shakespeare, Inducted 2005
· Socrates, Inducted 2004
· Nikola Tesla, Inducted 2004

None of these people were actual members of Mensa, of course.

Notice how Shakespeare only cracked the nod in 2005. He must have been the subject of heated debate (“Yes his little stories are neat, but how did he contribute to the US bottom line and its quest for world dominance people? God Bless America.”)

How funny that the “High IQ Society” makes IQ tests look stupid.

Terror in the sky

2006-08-23T10:17:00.000+01:00

Interesting article of the terror plot recently foiled in England here

UN is 'not Africa's messiah'

2006-08-19T19:25:00.000+01:00

From news24

Johannesburg - United Nations special envoy to Africa Stephen Lewis "is not Africa's Messiah" and does not understand the country's HIV/Aids programmes, according to the health department.

"We reject with contempt the statement made by Stephen Lewis with regard to response of South African government to the challenge of HIV and Aids," said department spokesperson Sibani Mngadi in a statement on Saturday.

Mngadi said Lewis' comments should not be seen as the views of the UN and its agencies, which continued to work on HIV/Aids with SA.

On Friday, Lewis told the International Aids conference in Toronto, Canada, that SA could "never achieve redemption" for its HIV/Aids policies as 600 to 800 people a day died of Aids in SA.

Lewis said what the South African government was doing was "wrong, immoral and indefensible".

He accused the government of expounding HIV/Aids theories "more worthy of a lunatic fringe than a concerned and compassionate state".

SA government has tripled the budget allocation for the HIV and Aids over the last four years from just over R1 billion in 2002 to R3.5bn in 2005. This allocation constitutes 90% of resources currently being used to implement HIV and Aids in South Africa," said Mngadi.

He said Lewis should say whether any other country had distributed, as SA did, more 340 million male condoms and close to three million female condoms each year free of charge, or had put more people on anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment than SA had.

Mngadi said what Africa needed was not an "unsubstantiated attack", but delivery on the many resolutions made by international organizations and other countries on "addressing poverty and underdevelopment which increases the vulnerability of our populations to diseases".

I can tell you now, the UN is the most non-confrontational organization in the world. If Steven Lewis is shouting at Manto, it means he must consider her beyond diplomacy... Consummate diplomats do not get enraged easily.

What the UN does not understand is that these people are not evil per se, they are just uneducated and uncouth.

And yes, it can be as simple as that.

And in a totally related story: Manto gets a new Merc

For a scathing factsheet on this dumb as dirt piece of shit, please see the DA's Fire Manto site.

Science podcasts

2006-08-17T16:46:00.000+01:00

Do any of you listen to podcasts much? After listening to one on Dr. Borlaug this morning on my way to work, I have decided to check out more science related podcasts. I have found one cool website so far, The Science Show. Tomorrow morning I think I'll listen to a commentary on Not Even Wrong - a newly released book highly critical of String Theory. I read about in the UK Times, via aldaily, and it sound pretty interesting.

I will probably also check out the topics of the formation of the solar system and plate techtonics.

Any other recomended sites?

Is calling someone a racist not racist?

2006-08-17T15:04:00.000+01:00

This story is indicative of the politically correct bullshit pervading our society. Calling someone a racist should not be an argument in itself. Even if I say I think I am better than you, so what? You have your existence to prove me wrong. If a person is going to constantly invoke the spectre racism to win an argument, I will start thinking this person is an idiot, unable to have a dialogue or argue a point.

Its like the Dark Ages, when blasphemy was invoked to settle a dispute. I thought we were over that.

I guess not

Search Narratives

2006-08-16T14:17:00.000+01:00

from wikipedia:

"On August 4th, 2006, AOL released a compressed text file on one of its websites containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period, intended for research purposes. AOL pulled the file from public access by the 7th, but not before it had been mirrored, P2P-shared and seeded via BitTorrent. News filtered down to the blogosphere and popular tech sites such as Digg and Wired News.

Whilst none of the records on the file are personally identifiable per se, certain keywords contain personally identifiable information by means of the user typing in their own name (ego-searching), as well as their address, social security number or by other means. Each user is identified on this list by a unique sequential key, which enables the compilation of a user's search history. In fact, in a test, of whether it was possible to do so, the New York Times was able to locate several individuals from the released, and anonymized, search records alone.

AOL acknowledged it was a mistake and removed the data, although the files can still be downloaded from mirror sites. Additionally, several searchable databases of the report also exist on the internet."

You can use www.aolstalker.com to browse these logs. It's interesting to see the narratives that appear in some of these people's search histories. Here are some excerpts from the user 14162375 :

14162375 marriage counseling
14162375 spy on the wife
14162375 spy recorders
14162375 signs of cheating
14162375 tracking cell phone numbers
14162375 dealing with cheating wives
14162375 divorce lawyers
14162375 cheating wives
14162375 saving a marriege
14162375 sex products
14162375 sexual techiques
14162375 www.americagreentings.com
14162375 stop your divorce
14162375 alchool withdrawl sintoms
14162375 disfunctional erection
14162375 cheating therapy
14162375 women’s urine blood
14162375 spy from a distance
14162375 listen through walls
14162375 car sound recorder
14162375 car conversation spy
14162375 spy on wife
14162375 phico card readers
14162375 st. petersburg fl medium
14162375 psychic
14162375 psychic st.pete fl
14162375 get my wife back
14162375 i want revenge to my wife
14162375 get revenge from a wife cheater
14162375 munchies
14162375 lisbon jobs
14162375 divorce and kids
14162375 my wife wants to leave me
14162375 how do i get my wife love me again
14162375 need help getting my wife back
14162375 i want my wife bach
14162375 i need my wife to get back to me
14162375 my wife doesnt love animore
14162375 i still live whith my wife can i get her bach
14162375 i want revenge towards my wife
14162375 making my wife suffer as i do
14162375 making even with my wife
14162375 get my wife back
14162375 foxsoccerchnnel.com
14162375 get my wife back
14162375 avoid breaking up
14162375 my wife doesn’t love me anymore
14162375 stop breaking up
14162375 get even with my wife
14162375 husband revenge
14162375 how to harm my wifes lover
14162375 infidelity
14162375 catch your wife having an affair
14162375 baby monitors
14162375 my cheating wife
14162375 i want to kill myself
14162375 suicide help
14162375 helpe me with suicide
14162375 i want to make my wife suffer
14162375 kill my wifes mistress
14162375 my wifes ass
14162375 a cheating wife
14162375 recording home survellence
14162375 audio room surveillance
14162375 www.cornerspyshop.com
14162375 get rid of cheating wives
14162375 sore muscules
14162375 make the infidelity suffer
14162375 i am so italian
14162375 the portuguese mafia
14162375 www.ymca.comportuguese mafia
14162375 www.airportugal

And user 2917636:

2917636 date rape
2917636 is it normal to cook you rfriend breakfast after he rapes you
2917636 the morning after being raped
2917636 sexual assualt

I'll be spending hours on this site.

The drug league table

2006-08-16T09:57:00.000+01:00

The UK Science and Technology Select Committee, which advises the government, commissioned an assessment of 20 legal and illegal stimulants to examine the actual social and physical harm they cause based on scientific evidence. Here is the table they developed:

More info in New Scientist

Interesting to note that alcohol and tobacco rank higher than many illegal drugs that we were told by authorities will surely fry our brain, like LSD, pot and ecstasy.

Moral judgement?

2006-08-15T01:41:00.000+01:00

Hubbard against topless parade

TVNZ, Aug 15, 2006

Auckland City Mayor Dick Hubbard says a planned parade of topless porn stars on motorcycles on Queen St is inappropriate.

Next week's event, which is linked to the Erotica show, has been given the green light by the council's events and promotion staff.

But, Hubbard says it is a blatant promotion of the show and the street should not be used to endorse such a commercial event. He says he has asked the council's chief executive to look at the precedent the parade might set and whether there is a bylaw that could prevent it going ahead.

Hubbard says he is not making a moral judgement about the promotion of pornography.

Denial

2006-08-14T09:28:00.000+01:00

From The Independant:

South Africa's Aids epidemic is driving a new health crisis in the country as women, fearful of appearing to be HIV positive, are becoming obese in record numbers.

Nearly one third of women in South Africa are now severely overweight, Tessa van der Merwe of the International Association for the Study of Obesity has revealed, as a combination of new fears and traditional, cultural factors encourage excessive weight gain.

"Regretfully, there is a perception that if a black woman is thin, she might have HIV/Aids," Ms Van der Merwe said.

Deep fry your fear in fat

Be an organ donor - get a South African driver's license

2006-08-09T11:02:00.000+01:00

The other day when I received my renewed drivers license, I couldn't help but notice that the Organ Donor Foundation of S.A. found a perfect place to advertise:

Maybe the Organ Donor Foundation and the South African Traffic Department got some kind of deal going. Maybe they share the profits from the organs harvested from vehicular accident victims. That could at least be an explanation for the ridiculous road death toll we have in this country: almost 13,000 in 2004.

What a strange place.

The 20 most loathsome South Africans: Number 18: Pieter van Zyl (fat ref tackler)

2006-08-07T17:18:00.000+01:00

What an ambassador to South Africa. Heck, to rugby in general ("Fans like me is what rugby is about... I'm not sorry that I did what I did”). He eternalized the stereotypical South African male to millions watching that fateful game of what was reportedly rugby. Till he shoved his disgusting weight around, the ugly, beergutted, hate-filled piece of Apartheid excrement masquerading in a Springbok jersey was nothing more than an abstract notion to those spectators.

Not that anybody should care what any rugby aficionado thinks, but still: that disgusting hairy beer belly and intoxicated idiotic eyes are now indelibly etched into the minds of even rugby-loathing foreigners who just innocently watched the news or read the next day’s paper.

Far be it from Mr. van Zyl to publicly apologize to his fellow South Africans (I don’t care about the ref so much, he was shit). Instead, he subsequently sues SARFU for banishing him eternally from all rugby parks. He feels hard done by this decision, did not see it coming at all. Felt it was unfair.

But did you know this: Mr. van Zyl is not some poor simple manual labourer or even the shady manager of a cash-only liquor store in Boksburg, oh no, he is a successful businessman who has reportedly made considerable dough in the mining business.

He’s a multi-millionaire. In itself a compelling argument in favour of communism.

Mr. van Zyl spends his time gallivanting the rugby world to get kommen dronk, swear, and shake his fist redfacedly at the ref and players who can’t hear him or see him, even if they wanted to, which they certainly do not. This is his life, I shit you not, I did my homework. I can only speculate that upon return to his ostentatious bad-taste-oozing "eclectic" mansion he beats up his god-help-her wife, who soon relents and performs her womanly duty.

It’s been an unfortunate few decades for white South Africans: First apartheid, now this guy. He should be taken outside and shot, or worse, he should go sit in Madiba’s corner, with The Very Best of Celine Dion (1986 - 1989) playing all the while. For at least an hour. Nonstop.

loss

2006-08-07T02:31:00.000+01:00

What’s the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?

For me it was this dead creature I found lying in the middle of the road. I was driving back from my parents' place (since happily divorced), on my way to face another daunting week on Stellenbosch campus. This usually involved a relentless series of awkward and overwhelming events of sitcom proportions. I always spent the weekend at my parents’ in Somerset West, the idea of having a social life not yet having occurred to me. (How many people only discover and buy into the whole “going out and getting fucked” thing at 22 years of age? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.)

This was always the utter low point of the week. But driving my usual route (I fear uncharted territory), I got ready for my only respite on a post-Carte Blanche Sunday evening: a glimpse of my friends, two neighbourhood owls. They sometimes sat on this tennis fence in the yard on the corner of Buitenzorg and Oldenland, a block away from my house, other times on the higher of the two roads ten meters from where it flows into the one that meanders up the mountain.

But this time I could only see one owl, unapologetically sitting in the middle of the road with what seemed to be a smaller animal, a tender prey I presumed. As I got closer the visible owl flew away in its wide-eyed austere way, settling on the couple's favourite tennis fence. From there they have a clear view of the road and the little creatures that scurry underneath streetlights for food and shelter for the daytime, when humans come out to do their thing.

This is where my story takes a wrong turn. I drove past and stopped next to the lifeless animal. To my utter dismay, it perversely turns out to be the other owl. It was completely in tact, but must have been struck by a car, some fucker like me driving around the corner, on his way to some nowhere. I opened my door, and the car light that ingeniously automatically switches on upon breach of the perimeter, reflected on the still unsettlingly wide open, disproportionately large eyes of the bemused owl’s partner. It was alive and proud and magnificent a few minutes earlier, now it is dead, its being having irreversibly left an imprint on the neural pathways of its widow or widower, who will yearn in vain for its partner until the day it too must die.

Since then the place I grew up in has been sold to a foreign rich bastard who all but destroyed the 70-year old house called Buitenzorg (thus the street of the crime’s name). It was the the mansion of a farm-like setup, back in the day.

And so we all yearn for a previous state of things that can never be restored.

The 20 most loathsome South Africans: Number 19: Ferdinand Rabie (winner of first Big Brother SA)

2006-08-02T09:13:00.000+01:00

Ferdi is the guy you hated in high school because he inexplicably managed to have a lot of sex,

but you didn’t mind it so much because you knew he would turn out to be a bald, hairy drunk who shits on his own lawn.

There’s something very wrong with a world that turns someone like Ferdi into a folk hero. He has no discernable talents, not to mention a speck of originality. If your counterexample is his trademark “Wakka wakka”, DO come on. Its utter lack of wit and the way it can be used in any situation only belies a dull, undiscriminating mind. I’m willing to bet that expression is in any case not even his creation; it reeks of the type of incestuous vernacular bred in any boys’ high school. Only he found it sufficiently amusing to choose to hang on to it for the duration of his life. Small things.

Jealousy doesn’t enter into it. If reality TV game shows have taught us anything, it’s that being unable to incite jealousy can get one a long way in your quest for 15 minutes of fame. His popularity is a direct consequence of the fact that it’s practically impossible to be jealous of him. How could one be jealous of a virtual caveman? That’s why people voted for him: give HIM the fame and fortune. That way, we’re still only jealous of n people. n+1 would be too much to bear.

Non-white or non-Afrikaans South Africans look at this anti-person and assume that this is what us white Afrikaans males are all about. That we’re a bunch of dimwitted troglodytes

that drink beer all day and can sit in a house for 40 days straight without saying one, solitary intelligent thing, intent on fucking proper English concord up the ass every half chance we get.

And that’s too much to bear. Don’t even think of telling me that I am being melodramatic. In my industry it is clear to me that those not within my demographic assume we’re simpletons until we have repeatedly and tangibly proven otherwise.

But I was wrong about Ferdi: he’s actually the kind of guy that binges and takes a dump on the most public of lawns,

one that is surrounded by 17 cameras broadcasting 24 hours on international satellite television. "What!? Ferdi just shat on the lawn!? That's so sweet! Quickly, somebody give the guy a million bucks!"

the blog profile

2006-07-31T22:03:00.000+01:00

Selecting "favourite" artists for your blog profile is serious business. Your profile is your face and clothes in cyberspace, and should be given the same careful consideration, treated with the same care.

Many panic and actually select their favourite artists, the cyberspace version of not paying attention to the clothes worn by your peers, ignorant of what is obvious to the socially successful. You only end up looking like a child lost in an amusement park, too overwhelmed to laugh and play with the other kids.

This post should be seen as nothing more than a wakeup call. There is no static formula, that is the nature of any dynamic efficient market. Leniency should not be asked nor given, and pity is the kiss of death. You must make your optimal statement, where optimality should be a function of only your taste in people. Any other consideration is merely a distraction, there to lead the weak astray.

The rookie mistake is to include too many consensus artists in your selection, for example someone like Robert de Niro. Everybody knows Bobby (God rest his soul) used to be the king: you are making no statement whatsoever. Pointless, unless you only want to impress others who do not understand the subtleties of the game. Unfortunately most people find them uninteresting, even their own kind.

Of course, that's a rule of thumb. Like I say: there are no static formulas. Formulas can exist only fleetingly. Through their effectiveness and ability to spread they quickly render themselves obsolete.

A good example of the esoteric nature of the game then: breaking rule number 1 above can be very effective when a good mundane selection is artfully juxtaposed against an especially unconventional and cutting edge collection. This should not be attempted by just anyone.

Mere mortals to their eternal frustration sense a brilliant compilation, but they find the dynamic canvas too overwhelming to see the big picture at all clearly. They can never emulate such an assembly, and therefore respect and envy the mysterious statement made.

Ultimately there is just one way to be sure you have successfully crafted your portfolio: you attract the attention and approval of those who have blog identities that you find attractive, even if only on the surface. This is the only criteria, connecting with others is always the point. If it isn’t, you've come to the wrong place.

So a word to the wise: take the time, once a month (like I said it’s a dynamic, fast moving and unforgiving racket) to make sure your choices fit just right. Lure them into your consciousness, never allowing formulism to expose the limits of your artistic insight and foresight. And never trust anyone that says appearance doesn’t matter.

The 20 most loathsome South Africans: Number 20: Patricia de Lille

2006-07-31T08:27:00.000+01:00

A face you can trust

Patricia de Lille deserves her place in the 20 most loathsome South Africans not because of her career, which in general was respectable, but because when the moment came to speak truth to power, she shirked, and in a grand betrayal chose power over truth. Her actions during the 2006 Cape Town municipal elections negated all that came before, and it is this moment by which she will be remembered. She is loathsome not for what she was, but for what she could have been.

In early 2000, the Democratic Party (DP) formed a coalition with the National Party (NP), named the Democratic Alliance (DA), in order to stand up to the dominant African National Congress (ANC). In the 2000 municipal elections, this coalition was able to beat the ANC in the most hotly contested municipality, Cape Town, with 56.5% of the vote to the ANC’s 38.15%. However, Martinus van Schalkwyk, that spineless last leader of the NP and traitor to the Afrikaner people, decided to cross over to the ANC on the promise of more of whatever it was he believes make a man. The actions of this liar, combined with the nonsensical floor crossing law, took Cape Town municipality away from its democratically elected council and gave it to the ANC.

During the 2006 municipal elections, everybody knew that Cape Town would once again be one of the most contested municipalities. Before the elections, many smaller parties, including the DA and Patricia de Lille’s newly formed Independent Democrats (ID) decided to put their differences aside in order to be effective opposition to the ANC.

On election day, this coalition was able to beat the ANC, thanks to so many of the members of small political parties refusing to be bought or intimidated by ANC rapscallions. Of the 210-seat council, the DA won 90 seats, the ANC 81, the ID 23, with the rest split between smaller parties, most of them backing the DA.

It was a good day for democracy in South Africa.

Enter the politician’s fear of death. Patricia de Lille had always prided herself on standing up to ANC domination, and up to this point in her career she had lived this promise. But straight after the results of the Cape Town elections were posted, the ANC approached De Lille with an offer that must somewhere have made reference to her eternal soul. They offered her a place in their fold if she sided with them, and the two-faced liar turned on a dime. Like Anakin choosing the Dark Side, she broke off from the coalition and walked over to her sworn opposition, just like that.

It all came down to the vote for mayor. As no party had a clear majority, the mayor would be the power player in the council. It all seemed over for the DP, as Patricia de Lille now backed the ANC’s notoriously incompetent and corrupt incumbent mayor, the dim-witted Nomaindia Mfeketo. Yet when the votes were counted, the coalition had miraculously won by the smallest of margins - 106 votes for the DA’s candidate Helen Zille against 103 for Mfeketo. There were efforts by the ANC and ID to disrupt the voting, but the dye was cast.

And Patricia was left out in the cold, without an ideological house to call her home. She tried everything to reverse the count, even calling for the city to be placed under provincial administration, but her lowly efforts were in vain. When the DA offered De Lille two seats in the 9-seat mayoral council, as would have been the case if De Lille had not betrayed the coalition, she responded with a demand for a change in government from the mayoral executive to the executive committee system, a move that would have excluded the smaller parties from the leadership fray.

At this late stage, having betrayed and been forgiven, she could not accept those who forgave her, because in them she could see what she no longer was: An honest human being.

And so the book closes on Patricia de Lille.

Introducing the 20 most loathsome South Africans

2006-07-31T08:26:00.000+01:00

A few of us patterntubbers have compiled a list of the 20 most loathsome South Africans. Over the next few weeks we will be counting down these wretched individuals, posting on a new character every two days or so.

I hope you all enjoy

Withnail

2006-07-28T11:10:00.000+01:00

While tying my shoelaces this morning (a feat that demands quite a lot of concentration from me, 4 times a day), I for no good reason whatsoever thought of the movie Withnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987). Although, I was feeling a bit defeated, and I suspect it involuntarily made me think of the last scene in this film. This is one of my all time favourites, so touching, that I have come to associate melancholia itself with a picture of a dejected Richard E. Grant in the rain, a bottle of wine in one hand, and an umbrella in the other. If not one of the best pieces of acting I’ve seen, definitely one of the most convincing.

This film is one of those where the sum is greater than the parts. No-one involved ever got close to emulating their work in this film. It all came together, like some parties somehow just “work”. And you remember them for the rest of your life, without ever knowing the exact source of your nostalgia.

Richard E. Grant (aka Richard G. Esterhuyse) delivers what is without a doubt the best performance of his career, while Richard Griffiths as gay “uncle Monty” is at once believable and ridiculously eccentric . “Danny” will go down in history as the dope head to end all dope heads, and the joint he smokes as the joint to end all joints (it literally looks like something you could beat your wife with). I’m convinced many millions of brain cells have perished as a direct consequence of Ralph Brown's uncanny performance. The chemistry between the Withnail and I characters, I have no doubt, is one of most compelling I’ve ever experienced in a movie. They are the ultimate odd couple that somehow just belong together, complete each other: McGann, the neurotic “I”, and Grant, the impulsive hedonist that just does as he pleases, a drunk who’s allergic to alcohol. Their incomprehensible (but 100% devoid of any pretence) relationship is an entity in its own right, almost an extra character in this movie.

I think what sets this comedy apart from most truly funny comedies is how it succeeds in creating some of the most eccentric comic characters without ever sacrificing the viewer’s inclination to feel genuine empathy for them. You ultimately realize this in the last scene.

Anyone who hasn’t experienced this gem is doing himself a great disservice. It is easy to see why it has managed attract such a substantial cult following. One of the ultimate word-of-mouth films, in the same league as the Big Lebowski, Donnie Darko, This is Spinal Tap or any cult classic for that matter. Any self-respecting dope head should see this movie at least 10 times.

But to get back to the final scene:

The “I” character had just heard that he had won the lead role in a play (they are both struggling actors), against all expectations (especially Withnail’s). Withnail walks his friend to the train station to see him off. It’s clear at this stage that Withnail knows that their paths will part and that it’s the end of an era: nothing will ever be the same again. A successful career awaits “I”, one that Withnail has long ago resigned himself to never having. But more sad is that he is losing his dear friend. Up until this point he seemed like he only cared about himself and drugs and alcohol, and that he’s the type of person who just takes life as it comes. You unexpectedly and suddenly feel extremely sorry for Withnail, because you find out for the first time that he loves his friend more than anything, and he is lost without him.

He is ultimately a tragic figure. Then, in my all time favourite monologue, the pathos is only compounded by the ironic brilliance of Withnail’s haunting rendition of a quote from Hamlet, alone at a park after dropping off “I”, and hence a rendition no-one ever gets to see:

"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this mighty o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire; why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the world, paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust. Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither."

consider yourself warned

2006-07-27T11:37:00.000+01:00

Is it just me, or do advertisements and blurbs become more and more irritating as one gets older?

When you’re young, the concept of consumerism seems like a wholly theoretical construct (if you had even heard of it). It appears alarmist, the kind of thing only a paranoid schizophrenic concerns himself with. Of course, you’re soon disillusioned as you start to realize that everywhere around you are people and businesses that would do anything to make a quick buck off of you.

False advertising.

In my opinion the rules in South Africa are not anywhere near strict enough. For example, there is an ad on TV by an investment manager (I think Sanlam Investment Managers, but I might be wrong) that proudly says something to the effect: “So you’ll know EXACTLY what you’ll have when you retire.”

This is bullshit. There is no investment product out there that can tell you exactly how much you’ll have. I know this only because I work in the industry, but the average person will assume this is true and run off to the nearest Sanlam broker.

Then there’s the new JSE ad: “There’s nothing scary about investments”. I’m an investment analyst, and trust me, it’s scary. There are few things that scare me more than the equity markets. They are brutal. Ask those who invested everything in Di Data (there were many, and this kind of behaviour is encouraged by ads like these) and lost 25% in 2 months, 88% in one year, and 97% in 2 ½ years. It is irresponsible for the JSE to advertise to the average South African, plain and simple.

It’s easy to dismiss this as a boring and irrelevant issue, but do that at your own peril. One day, whether you like it or not, you’ll be 60, and you’ll want to retire. If your financial planner was incompetent (or shady enough to sell products that maximise his commission), it could mean that you will have to work until the day you die. It won’t seem as mundane an issue then.

I have spoken to many highly intelligent people who do not have the foggiest clue where their pension is being invested. Sometimes you’ll get a confident “Coronation”. So what? Coronation (or any other asset manager) provides 100’s of products, each appropriate for a different group of people. Not knowing where your pension is invested is like living in Johannesburg and sleeping with the front door wide open.

You do get guaranteed products. They generally guarantee you won’t lose money over a period of 5 years or longer. What they don’t tell you is that they guarantee your money back, not because they are so skilful, but because they invest a large portion in a government guaranteed zero-coupon bond. The rest is invested in growth investments, like equity. A sufficient proportion is allocated in the bond so that when the bond matures in 5 years, they could pay you back your money with the redemption amount, even of they completely lost the other proportion invested in the equity markets. This takes NO skill whatsoever. Not only do you pay an unnecessary fee for them to have no skill, you lose a lot of the upside potential you would have had had you been fully invested in the equity markets.

Now for the clincher: what they don’t tell you is that it is nearly impossible to lose money on the equity market if you keep your money invested in an index-tracking equity fund for a period of 5 years or longer. The All Share Index has backtracked over a 5-year period maybe once or twice in 80 years, and even when it happens, it’s unlikely that you’ll lose more than a few percent (i.e. more than the cost of the guaranteed product). If you get sucked into this product at the age of 25, by the time you’re 65, you could easily have a third of the pension you should have had if you were invested in the appropriate product. Easily.

So to recap on guaranteed funds: you incur costs and lose upside potential, for something you don’t need, and takes no skill whatsoever: Use THAT as blurb.

Another example: Outsurance and their “outbonus”. The outbonus isn’t some altruistic miracle. You don’t get an outbonus because they’re nice people. It’s simply priced into your premium. Simple as that. You pay them, they pay you back. But only if you’re good.

Then there are these ridiculous products sold as “life insurance that pays out something while you’re alive”. There is currently some TV infomercial that rants on about it, but I can’t remember what company it is. Again, this is included in you premium. You are paying for two products, you just don’t know it. They aren’t nice people, they’re insidious tricksters. You end up investing a portion of that premium in an investment that could be completely inappropriate, and losing a portion of that to unnecessary fees. All the average person thinks is "waita minute, I actually get money back? Jeez, that's much better than only getting money when I die, heck, count me in".

An inappropriate investment can easily mean that your retirement is deferred from 50 to 70. Think about that. Absorb it fully.

The social contract

2006-07-24T11:43:00.000+01:00

This article which recently appeared in Mail & Guardian reminded me of something I read in Paul Johnson’s History. He notes how the governments of developed nations should have understood from the outset that the spread of AIDS was not primarily their concern, because, and I quote:

Hugely expensive and probably ineffectual government campaigns against drug abuse and AIDS saw the modern state in a characteristic, twentieth-century posture - trying to do collectively what the sensible and morally educated person did individually.

Of course, such opinions sound absurd to the South African ear. But while this view is in complete contrast to every single mainstream opinion, one has to wonder. It seems that nobody has thought of actually holding individuals responsible for their own behavior, instead of expecting government to act as nursemaid to it's citizenry. And although I understand the chorus singing about how government is not doing enough, I can't help thinking that these people are just living on another planet. I mean no matter which backwater village you live in, you must have by now heard of AIDS. And if you had to hear that a deadly disease is making the rounds, one would think it would at least spark the smallest iota of interest - at least enough to finish reading the paragraph or stay listening to the radio. You know, up to the part where it notes that "AIDS is real, incurable and spread mainly through heterosexual sex”. Or if one had to hear about it from a friend, would that not motivate one to do some research on the matter, like asking a nurse in the village clinic, before going out and having unprotected sex again.

People blame Mbeki for not sending a clear enough message, but it appears to me that these people aren't picking up any messages whatsoever. According to the survey noted above, 8% of people in SA still do not believe that AIDS exist. That's 1 in 12.

Haven't they noticed the people dying around them?

genetics vs memetics

2006-07-21T19:35:00.000+01:00

I haven’t read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, so what follows could be laughably obvious, or worse, utter bullshit.

Only about a week ago I fully appreciated for the first time why Dawkins’ concept of memetics is so compelling. The relationship with genetics is more than just its analogous process of procreation and evolution. The really interesting part is arguably their symbiotic relationship.

Genes and memes (in the most comprehensive sense) constitute a humans being’s two profound faculties of identity. We are in a sense nothing more than our genetic makeup and the memetic dynamics of our collection of memes. The parallel coexistence of these two processes is a beautiful concept. Without genes, memes would not exist. Without memes, genes would not be able to evolve as quickly and efficiently as they do.

At first I subconsciously assumed it’s an accidental relationship, the one feeding off the other. Perhaps because of the uneasiness between the two which manifests itself in human terms through conflicts between body (genes) and mind (memes). To me, this conflict continually manifests itself in our ambivalent stance between the needs of the two. Do I flirt with the beautiful model on the left or the interesting nerd on the right?

It’s obvious, however, that memes are the more promising entity when it comes to the continued conservation and development of knowledge. They would eventually not need genes (humans) to exist and procreate. Describing our lifetime as the “The Information Age” will seem more and more ridiculous as time goes by. If humans survive another 100 years without some cataclysmic event destroying all progress, memes will be virtually immortal, in one form or another.

But it’s not just about symmetry; it’s really about continuity. They are not just parallel processes that happen to help each other out. We arguably live in a major transition period in which the biological hands over the bastion of information conservation and development to the infinitely more robust and flexible: ones and zeros. A much purer and less constrained form of information, and all that is needed for memes to exist. Memetics is in a sense the fruits of the labour of genes. Genes gave birth to memetics, which is taking things to the incomprehensible next level.

A cataclysmic event could easily wipe genes out any second, but if this event is delayed another 100 years, genes would in all probability already succeeded in rendering (either by intelligent design or by pure chance) memes an autonomous entity, and taken the conservation and evolution of a seemingly divine experiment in knowledge to places we can only try to imagine.

I think I have always been hesitant to read Dawkins because I am not ready for his level of atheism. I already see things much more mechanically than is strictly healthy (for me anyway). Dawkins has surely conceived the most impenetrable “religion” yet. But I’m sure it will evolve.

I really should read more.

The rise of the National Party in South Africa

2006-07-21T07:53:00.000+01:00

The story of the National Party (NP) and their ascent to political power in South Africa must start with the Boer War (1899-1902), which was fought between the British Empire and Afrikaner settlers seeking independence from the British. It was a war of attrition, with Lord Milner, commander of the British troops, practicing what he called his ‘scorched earth’ policy, which entailed burning every Boer home they came across to the ground and putting all Boer women and children in concentration camps, in the hopes that this will lessen the resolve of the Boer men. To quote from Encarta:

“Some 27,927 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, died as epidemics of measles and typhus raged through these camps during 1901. This was far more than the total number of combatants killed on both sides during the war. Three quarters of these deaths were of children under the age of 16.”

It was this war and these actions that made the Boers hate the British with such lasting passion, and rightly so. The Civilizers showed how often civilization means nothing more than organized barbarism.

Fast forward 37 years to 1939. The United Party (UP), a coalition of English and Afrikaans parties under the leadership of Barry Hertzog and Jan Smuts had won the national elections in 1934. Europe was teetering on the brink of war, and when England finally declared war on Germany for invading Poland, Herzog refused to commit to the war. The majority of the United Party caucus were however of a different mind, and Hertzog was forced to resign. Jan Smuts succeeded him and immediately sided with the British and declared war on Germany

The Afrikaner community was completely alienated by this decision. Why, after all, should they fight for the British, who they were at war with a few decades ago? Particularly against Germany, a people with whom the Afrikaners had always felt a close cultural affiliation towards? Germany had supported the Afrikaners in their quest for nationhood, whilst many Afrikaners still recall the destruction of their families at the hands of the British during the Boer War – an event in living memory.

With conscription legislated, Afrikaner men were forced to fight in the war. Many Afrikaner communities came out in protest, and pro-German organizations like the Ossewabrandwag were established. The UP government responded by placing thousands of Boers in internment camps for the duration of the war, which brought back the painful memories of the Boer War and effectively unified Afrikaners in a common hatred of the British and the UP government.

The centre could not hold, and the Afrikaner elements of the UP broke away from the coalition government and under the leadership of DF Malan re-established the National Party as a fiercely Afrikaner and fiercely nationalist party.

In 1948 the National Party won the elections in a landslide, with the promise that the Afrikaner will never be marginalized again. Ever. Not like they had been by the British in the Boer War, not like they had been by their own government in the Second World War. Not by the dictatorship of the majority. On this promise the NP won every succeeding election until 1994. And it was from this desire for a nation, for a home of their own, that Apartheid was born.

The Pearl

2006-07-20T21:05:00.000+01:00

It is wonderful the way a little town keeps track of itself and of all its units. If every single man and woman, child and baby, acts and conducts itself in a known pattern and breaks no walls and differs with no one and experiments in no way and is not sick and does not endanger the ease and peace of mind or steady unbroken flow of the town, then that unit can disappear and never be heard of. But let one man step out of the regular thought or the known and trusted pattern, and the nerves of the townspeople ring with nervousness and communication travels over the nerve lines of the town. Then every unit communicates to the whole.

- John Steinbeck

The conflict

2006-07-19T06:21:00.000+01:00

Here is a short and well written article that could serve as an introduction to what is going on in the Middle East.

And as a point of argument, let me just say that the South African media is sickeningly bias towards the conflict, siding without fail against Israel and always choosing pseudo-pundits from the gallery of 'Arab voices' for its daily sound byte. Make no mistake, behind this conflict is not the state of Israel, but the totalitarian regimes of Syria and Iran, who are greedy, blind and corrupt, without any saving graces.

In South Africa, my life is worth shit in the eyes of the government. They truly could not care less whether I live or die. The Israelis are different. They believe that the life of every member of society is worth the entire society. Society as family, as community. Can you imagine living in such a society? Tears, where did they come from?

There have been Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria since the Six Day War in 1967. They have not given these people citizenship. They have kept their own kind in camps for 40 years. Why? Because these camps provide sons and daughters that can be used as terrorists against Israel, because as long as these camps exist there will be Palestinians searching for a home. The Arab states don’t want peace, because war keeps attention away from their own decrepit regimes. Just like Bush has been playing the patriot card again and again as stories of corruption and deceit have surfaced in the press, so these leaders cry Zionist every time somebody starts talking about the terribility of their regimes.

Their own people. Think of the way Israel treats its people, then think of the way the surrounding Arab states treat theirs, and then and only then can you talk to me about who is the aggressor.

cabin fever

2006-07-17T17:06:00.000+01:00

We are becoming increasingly disenchanted with ourselves. In an overpopulated petri dish, allies eventually become competitors. In addition, we all have to compete with frankly superhuman fictional characters and glamorised celebrities sold to us by a money grubbing media.

Money makes the world go round. We say it until it becomes a cliché. It then loses its meaning you see, and we forget the unpleasant reality that underpins it. Like jokes about aging and its inevitable conclusion. Knowledge loses its impact with time; familiarity breeds indifference. Clichés shouldn’t be used less, we should just remind ourselves what they mean from time to time. Assuming we want to remember.

One could be forgiven for assuming that as we evolve we would remember more of previous generations, but that is not the case. I think generational gaps are widening and so is the contempt for our parents and their parents, who are rendered obsolete by Moore's law at a younger age. Chances are whatever good qualities you posess, you still feel inferior to too many others perceived to be better looking, smarter, funnier, nicer, thinner. We're all depressingly expendable.

It’s ironic that in this supposed age of individualism, most individuals have become less rather than more appreciated. A simple blacksmith of a small medieval village enjoyed the respect and admiration of his the town folk because he delivered a crucial and tangible product. He sensed an appreciation and this naturally pleased him, giving him a sense of self-worth.

I sometimes wish I were Asterix, regularly saving his village with his cunning, which is dearly appreciated by the villagers. I would even settle for Unhygenix, the guy who sells fish of a suspect maturity. He’s the best they have, so they have no choice but to appreciate him.

These days you open a phone book and can choose from a 100 insurance salesmen, each of them delivering indistinguishable products and quality of service. Whatever service it is you offer to earn your place in this world you probably suspect it can be done more competently and efficiently by countless peers.

You could say that there is only so much respect, admiration, and self-worth going around. It does not increase pro rata as the population doubles every 20 years, implying a lower average per person. We are marginalising ourselves by not being able to switch off our genes’ command to go forth and multiply, which was a good strategy 500 years ago, but is now not only obsolete but misguided. I struggle to understand why a bigger emphasis is not placed on population control, but I suspect it has something to do with money. HIV is sad, overpopulation is tragic.

This is a shit way to look at yourself and others, but constantly being bombarded by a value system becoming more and more GDP oriented eventually takes its toll on your view of yourself and the world in which you live.

The remedy, I am starting to realize, is to make a concerted effort to have a direct benevolent impact, however small, on those you hold dear.

2006-07-14T13:45:00.000+01:00

from John Banville's The Sea

Well light my fire

2006-07-13T12:15:00.000+01:00

I will just quote from the Washington Post:

"The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.

The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.

"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."

Even I would have thought that smoking pot at the very least causes lung cancer. I mean, at least that! It is smoke, after all. But instead, it actually has some protective effect: the smoke is able to kill off dying cells before they are able to mutate and cause cancer.

Now I assume all plans can go ahead for putting the stuff in the drinkwater.

the wrong side of the law

2006-07-12T16:33:00.000+01:00

What is the price we pay for law and order? Is it monetary? The cost of prisons must be considerable. The impact of the loss of man hours on the all important GDP is no doubt a notable agenda item for lawmakers. Certain freedoms must of course also be curved for the greater good. I certainly don’t feel that I need stop signs. I tend to stop as a matter of principle when huge chunks of metal are speeding in a direction that conflicts with my own.

These are all noteworthy costs, but in my opinion the biggest, most disturbing, most neglected cost is summarized by a well known term in US law: reasonable doubt. Thanks to an overabundance of soppy US law dramas, one could be tempted to say this term has become a cliché. Thing is I suspect it never had well defined meaning to start with. This is quite convenient and one could be forgiven for thinking that there may even be a conspiracy to that effect.

What I mean is: how much doubt is reasonable? It’s not like it implies a probability. An omniscient observer could go and count all the convictions, among those count all the wrongful convictions, and divide the latter by the formula to find a percentage. This percentage would be a point estimate for so called reasonable doubt. One in a thousand may sounds acceptable, until you consider the millions upon millions of convicts world wide.

We’ve all heard the horror stories of wrongful death sentences discovered posthumously through technological advances like DNA testsing, and while that particular variety of fuckup is the most harrowing and regrettable, less grave wrongful convictions by extension also occur…albeit reasonably infrequently.

These unlucky souls pay the true price for law and order. Just imagine being in that position: your friends and family could turn against you, you lose years of your life, your job, your ability to find a new job, traveling privileges, the trust of those around you to mention just a few. No amount of proclaiming your innocence is ever going to make the suspicion go away. Not to mention your disillusionment with society, the law and your Faith.

So there is implicitly this reasonable amount of lives destroyed every day. The good news is that a reasonable proportion of us will never experience the wrong side of this coin. Consequently we sit back, throw our hands in the air, shrug, and say that this is the only way. It’s the best system we’ve got. That’s what was said during any dubious social system, official or otherwise, used in the past. Many historical social constructs now seem inhuman or barbaric in hindsight, e.g. stonings, the exile of lepers, and lots of other stuff in the Bible. I suspect history will not look kindly upon current penal systems.

But what do those on the other side of the fence (or bars) have to say about the reasonableness of the situation? I wonder. The dilemma is that these victims of Justice have no voice. Would you believe a convict that claims he is innocent? I doubt these people even bother proclaiming their innocence. Notwithstanding the futility of it: rather a criminal than a victim.

People are seldom touched by something if it has no direct bearing on their lives. Innocents die every day all around the world, but blissfully ignorant I go on with my personal pursuit of happiness, which includes finding a pair of jeans that sits just right, owning a coffee table that really ties my living room together, and writing supposedly clever, idle messages on my blog. However, if I were to get the wrong end of the justice stick, I would probably fall on my knees like Charlton Heston and damn the whole system to hell. And it won’t be because I would learn anything I did not already know, I’d be more like the crusading cancer survivor. Only no-one would feel sorry for me.

Since childhood I’ve felt this vague discomfort when hearing this nebulous term “reasonable doubt” blurted out patriotically and unflinchingly by some American idiot: “Yep, proof must be given beyond a reasonable doubt. Them’s the rules, sonny”. I tried to picture this concept of reasonableness, but to no avail. I imagined instead that it’s just my obsessive compulsive thoughts getting trapped in some tricky but negotiable corner of reality again. When you’re young you assume the fundamentals had been sorted out long ago. As you get older you start to realize they never will be.

The conspiracy, then, is more insidious than most: we lie to ourselves to make things simpler, more acceptable. It just makes evolutionary sense. Reading this has put you an infinitesimal amount off the ideal track to oblivious happiness and the procreational benefits that tend to accompany it.

Now, next time you watch some David E. Kelly legal farce containing the inevitable smoking gun or verbal abuse induced confession, you too will feel a rational amount of discomfort. This is my gift to the voiceless.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

2006-07-11T15:03:00.000+01:00

[Collectable Hiëronymous Bosch figurines]

The planets

2006-07-11T14:05:00.000+01:00

Via Reason Hit and Run

94x magnification of velcro being pulled apart

2006-07-10T08:41:00.000+01:00

Pretoria in images

2006-07-09T15:36:00.000+01:00

meanderings

2006-07-07T17:41:00.000+01:00

I have this one memory of me as a ten year old boy analyzing the cornerstone of our church and thinking how absolutely perfect that corner was. I believed that there were good and competent adults in complete control of all aspects of the world, and this cornerstone, exemplified this. I thought all streets were perfectly built, with a precision that I assumed was total. The imagination of a child found the imposed structure not divinity, but rather the most common human aspect; these builders and deciders I never imagined as a physical presence, but rather simply as faceless humanity, committed to perfection, expressed as symmetry. This is not a story to get somewhere else. This was the closest I ever got to faith.

To me there is still nothing more beautiful than symmetry, but now I don’t look for it in corners and pillars and marvels of engineering. Rather, with the inevitable loss of faith I found consolation in the purely formless. Now it feels to me that in the abstract the impossibility of perfect symmetry is acknowledged and consecrated, made the holy of holies. Because God cannot be imagined or attained, we pray through a man, we worship a stone.

Fun at the Office

2006-07-06T16:01:00.000+01:00

Every so often our office manager (read PA (read secretary)), with great care, discreetly presents me with a yellow file with a birthday card inside, accompanied by a grave, almost accusatory look. It translates exactly (as opposed to loosely) to: “Inscribe the card. Pass it on to the next guy. Don’t fuck this up”. To him, this is serious stuff. I think it’s a major focus in his annual review.

The weird thing is the cloak-and-dagger action surrounding it. Everybody knows they’re going to get a birthday card. It happens to everybody every year. A week before your birthday you notice every now and again someone avoids eye contact or suddenly turns way from you and scurries off. Potentially traumatic to the yet unsettled new people, insane to sane people. To be honest I still feel ostracized during my week of stealth activities. But I have abandonment issues.

And sure enough, like clockwork, on the morning of your birthday, what do you know, what’s that on your desk, how did this happen, I didn’t notice anyone passing anything around me!?: the card. Even more weird is that EVERYBODY nevertheless plays along. You make damn sure you’re not that guy that lets the mark, god forbid, prematurely physically see the actual card.

I’m toying with the idea of “accidentally” putting the ridiculous thing on the birthday boy’s desk grunting something to the effect that he must sign and pass along, and when confronted by the office manager, coldly imparting:

“I guess you think, ya know, you're an authority figure. With that stupid fucking uniform. Huh, buddy? ... King Clip-on Tie here. Big fucking man.... You know, these are the limits of your life, man. Ruler of your little fucking [office] here. You pathetic piece of shit."

If I’m toying with that idea, I’m seriously considering plotting a mysterious disappearance of the card every week, week after week. Heck, this has the potential to keep me amused for at least a year. Of course, if some Dick Tracy picks up that I’m the only person for a whole year to get a card, the game might very well be up.

Even more annoying is thinking of something to write on it. What do you write for somebody you hardly know, and who you get the distinct feeling that even if you did know them, you wouldn’t particularly like them? When you're me, there’s a fine line between being sincere and sounding like an asocial asshole. For the moment I’ve settled on a stock message that goes “Hi XXX. Have a great day!. B”. I’m considering leaving out the “Hi xxxx”. It sadly only occurred to me after about 6 months that I need not discriminate. There’s no way they can make me. Labour laws these days are watertight.

This way I don’t even have to bother to look at the name. Whoever you are, you just better call me when the cake’s in the kitchen. Otherwise you just go on doing whatever it is that you do.

The “B” is also in danger of being a casualty of the knife of my apathy. Come to think of it, I could actually just tick my name on the list and no one is likely to ever be the wiser.

In any case, as long as the mark doesn’t actually see me write in it, The Office will be in perfect, lubricated harmony. A well oiled machine as it were.

Mugabe

2006-07-06T11:39:00.001+01:00

Few themes permeate the South African media as frequently and uniformly as the madness of Mugabe. Yet I have found precious few in the mainstream media who have ever tried to understand this man or trace his madness to a source or reason or rational. Now I am the last person to stand up for this bedlamite, but I believe there is more to this man than meets the media.

To understanding the madness of this Mugabe we need to return to the fateful year of 1992. When Zimbabwe achieved independence from white minority rule in 1980, Mugabe’s regime inherited a country with relatively little debt, strong financial institutions, and a very powerful agricultural sector. Yet, as countries are wont to do, Zimbabwe wanted to loan some money.

Tragically, it did so in the period of the World Bank’s and the IMF’s now notorious Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). These SAPs (or ‘golden straitjackets’ as they were later called) were the restrictions forced upon any country required to borrow money from these fine remnants of World War II. Zimbabwe's adjustment program contained the usual collection of Bank-inspired reforms, among them the devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar (absurd if considered in today's context), chopping "social spending", increasing emphasis on the reduction of the government deficit, civil service reform and the shedding of public enterprises - all the standard ingredients of "liberalization”.

Of course there was a string of large loans and credit facilities from the Bank, the IMF, and international donors, aimed at supporting the country's balance of payments and the government's plans for substantial private sector infrastructural development. At the outset, it was estimated that roughly US$3 billion over five years would be needed from overseas donors to make the reforms work. Zimbabwe would spend its way into a new free market on borrowed money.

When a massive drought hit the region in 1991/1992 – referred to as the apocalypse drought – the government could do little to alleviate the suffering of its people. Its hands were tied by the agreements it signed with the IMF and World Bank. Yet even following the advice of the West word for word, Foreign Direct Investment disappeared at a time when it was promised by Those Who Know, and the country spiraled into an economic crisis. When vast amounts of food ‘aid’ arrived, it greatly damaged the Zimbabwean economy. With a market flooded with food ‘aid’ the struggling farmers not only had no recourse to easy credit, but had to compete in a market flooded with free food. An example: Zimbabwe ended its policies of farmer subsidization during the famine, in an attempt, and I quote, “to increase producer incentives at a time when large supplies of foreign maize would otherwise have driven prices down” (Evaluation Synthesis Report Prepared for USAID/Bureau for Humanitarian Response).

For Mugabe, this betrayal was too much, but as soon as he lashed out at The Hand, he suddenly found himself isolated, portrayed as just another mad dictator running his country into the ground. This, together with the death of his wife in 1992, pushed this man over the edge, and turned him into a paranoiac.

In international politics, especially when it relates to Black Africa, who’s left to trust?

And this brings me to my second point: Westerns (and related media purveyors) still refuse to grasp the popularity of this man in Africa. Whilst the media in general is characterized by the shortest attention span, and zero historical insight, many on the continent still judge Mugabe not on his level of pragmatism or his presidential actions, but rather on his role as freedom fighter in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In a poll undertaken by New Africa magazine in 2004, Mugabe was voted by its readers as the third greatest African of all time, only after Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah (Although I must admit this may say more about Africa in general than Mugabe in particular). While the likes of Bush, Blair, and the South African media think sanctions will show this man that the tide of world opinion is against him, this is in fact not the case at all. African opinion is still strongly behind Mugabe, and he knows it.

But it is not only the rest of Africa that supports the tyrant, and the most painful realization for most people, it is also the Zimbabwean citizenry. Although there were some irregularities in the last elections, Mugabe won easily. He is voted into power time and time again by the poorest and those suffering most from his blindness and paranoia. That’s the truth, and no number of observer missions is going to change that.

In any case, what do we expect the South African government to do? Most people say the SA government should do something more, but what exactly? Invade Zim? Surely you jest. Sanctions? That will only worsen the Zimbabwean situation, leading to even more illegal Zimbabwean immigrants flooding into the country. Right now Mbeki is the only leader that Mugabe gives half an ear. That might sound like nothing, but right now Mbeki is the hand holding Zimbabwe from falling off the cliff. And you want him to let go?

Post Note: Click here for an evaluation report from the World Bank on Zim’s SAPs, in the form of “lessons learnt”

Too Much

2006-07-06T07:37:00.000+01:00

A mouse rides on the back of a frog in floodwaters in the northern Indian city Lucknow June 30, 2006. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar (INDIA)

[Yahoo! News]

Fargo

2006-07-04T14:58:00.000+01:00

Opening credits:

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.
At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.
Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

End credits:

The persons and events portrayed in this production are fictitious.

Oh, in a general sort of way

2006-07-04T14:06:00.000+01:00

- OK. I want you to tell me what these fellas look like.
- The little guy was kinda funny-lookin'.
- In what way?
- I don't know. Just funny-lookin'.
- Can you be any more specific?
- I couldn't really say. He wasn't circumcised.
- Was he funny-lookin' apart from that?
- Yah.

[brief pause]

- So, you were having sex with the little fella, then?
- Uh-huh.
- Anything else you can say about him?
- No. Like I say, he was funny-lookin'. More than most people, even.

Denzel Washington is......Sidney Poitier

2006-07-03T11:10:00.000+01:00

Has anyone yet made a serious film that accurately depicts the average black South African? It occurred to me recently that the reason local films fail to captivate is that they are not consistent with reality. Apart from the fact that they fail to hold my interest, much more importantly, these films cannot shed any light on the South African predicament.

SA films all to some extent convey a picture of very similar peoples who happen to have different colours of skin. All the strife between them are made out to be a legacy of Apartheid or the result of age-old distrust, lack of knowledge or indiscriminate racism in general. Blacks in SA films are white people with black skin. How insulting this must be to them.

The films portray a race with similar morals, humour, fears and ambitions. It’s a nice thought, but it’s also utter bullshit. These films are mostly aimed at SA whites, because they constitute 99% of the film going public. It makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside if we hear it’s all just one big misunderstanding. Meanwhile back at the ranch my gardiner is collecting frog's eyes and harvesting the genitals of a young child to give to his witchdoctor, who will then proceed to cure his impotence.

The reality is that when I walk past a black man in the street, I recognize nothing in the windows to his soul. To white people, this man’s eyes are impenetrable and devoid of empathy. That is not to say he is devoid of empathy, only that the divide in culture is so great, his body language is illegible to the white man. But how can you have genuine empathy for someone you don’t understand? I cannot speak for blacks, but I imagine the white man is just as enigmatic to them.

As soon I realize a local film or film about SA tries to say that beneath the skin we are all essentially the same, I'm almost relieved: sitting through another trite mediocre film on racism is narrowly averted. Trying to fool everyone including ourselves that we are all made of the same stuff is ironically only deepening the chasm. If however, we could really appreciate our differences in culture, politics, communication and just about everything, the conflict could either quickly be resolved or the minority can be swiftly eliminated. Either way, let’s get this over with.

2006-07-02T21:19:00.000+01:00

a man might be able to give an idea his name
eventually he will be wrong
and desert sunsets don't care if they're seen

2006-06-29T16:52:00.000+01:00

There are many victims. Some are the victims of victims.

All the president's persons

2006-06-29T16:26:00.000+01:00

While surfing the website of the South African Department of Health I came across the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel Report of 2001. It seems that when President Mbeki finally decided to do something about the AIDS pandemic in South Africa, he inviting the leading cranks of the scientific fringe to tell him how the rest of the peer-reviewed scientific world got the whole “AIDS” thing wrong.

I would love to know whose personal assistant with a grade 8 certificate and internet access decided on the composition of this panel. Did he or she just Google the terms 'AIDS' and 'dissident' and then sent out fully paid invitations to the first ten names that popped up?

I draw your attention to a title in chapter 2: Does HIV cause AIDS? This is like getting creationists to debate cosmogony and calling it a scientific discussion (or as Bush put it, “hearing both sides of the story”). Some of the alternative causal explanations are the "Chemical AIDS hypothesis", where AIDS is caused by ‘exposure to toxins’ such as AZT (yes, the drug the rest of the world uses to fight the disease); and the "Immunotoxicological hypothesis", where AIDS is caused by various ‘stressors’. My personal favorite, however, has got to be the "Oxidation Hypothesis", under which it is simply stated that ‘oxidization agents’ lead to AIDS.

O. Now I see. And to think it was oxygen all along. I should have known.

Although I recommend reading the whole report, another spot of special scientific rigor is chapter 5: The Treatment and use of Antiretroviral Drugs.
I quote:

“It was also argued that the drugs themselves caused AIDS, since they act on cells that are either metabolically active or in constant division”

Exactly what does this mean? If anybody out there can explain that last sentence to me I will buy them a beer/house/tropical island.

Or this gem of a quote from Chapter 6 of the report, which discusses prevention methods:

“Dr Giraldo recommended that the first point of entry for prevention was to stop the media-generated hysteria on AIDS. He argued that this hysteria and fear contributed to suppression of the immune system of people who were told that they are HIV-positive on the basis of unreliable tests and were doomed to die.”

I am speechless. I am without speech.

Knowledge Management

2006-06-28T13:35:00.000+01:00

Long term phased projects (especially when it is complicated engineering development for government procurement) are feeling the brunt of the affirmative action policy as well. Development projects aim to increase service delivery and raise the living standards of all South Africans. A white professional is lucky to get a position as contractor in his private capacity on such projects, but will not, regardless of qualification or experience, be given permanent employment. Employment contracts are typically linked to the duration of a development phase within the project. Gap periods lasting from 3 months to a year, depending on the project, are experienced between development phases. Financial planning and allocation for the next project phase with approval procedures for work completed in previous phases are typical constituents of these gap periods. All sounds fair thus far, right…
Wrong!

Here’s the glitch…

Since the contractor is not an affirmative action candidate (otherwise he surely would not have worked as a contractor) and the contract was linked to “as long as there’s work”, the project manager is compelled to terminate the contract during the gap periods. Contractors are forced to look for new work (with international opportunities appearing even more promising). Project specific knowledge and experience are lost. Destroyed. As a result, immense indirect costs are incurred to redevelop human capital during the next phase of the project. These costs are reflected through low employee output, an increase in development mistakes of the project and massive increases in time and financial costs required for successful project completion. This ill influence of affirmative action might be a factor input to many project failures throughout South Africa that impedes economic growth to a large extent. Is it appropriate to question AA's influence on our economy; costs (direct and indirect) to the economy? Is research on the AA policy and the influence thereof on business growth acceptable or is the elite, benefiting from other AA advantages, smothering all questions?

Will I enjoy leaving South Africa at the end of August, knowing that in January some other sucker is required to study 1300 pages in my filing cabinet, prior to any efficient project continuation? I can tell you, it will leave a bitter taste!

To whom it may concern

2006-06-28T08:37:00.000+01:00

Dear American Reader

On a day-to-day individual basis I do not discriminate in any way. In fact, I am often surprised at the level of racism I see at work (I work for a multi-national composed 75% of foreigners), which is probably of the few places in South Africa where racism is white looking down on black.

I think what B is talking about in his post is the very strange and unique situation we have in South Africa, which many call 'reverse racism'. (This is, of course, a misnomer. There is no such thing as reverse murder. Murder as revenge is still murder.)

In South Africa, there is institutionalized racism against non-black people. Although all sectors, particularly the public sector, face a severe skills shortage, white people are not considered equally for positions, due to affirmative action and something called Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE. Both these primitive concepts (which have failed dismally wherever they have been tried) have not only been legislated, but each company over 50 people must to have an affirmative action strategy to ensure that the color of their staff and the ownership of the company reflects the 'demographic composition' of the country (79% of South Africa is Black, 9.6% is white), or else they get fined. Small business owners and entrepreneurs now don’t only have to worry about making a profit and creating employment; they have to sign away a large part of the ownership of their business to black people once they succeed in growing their company.

This is thievery. No other word for it.

The system has led to a great deal of corruption, with the same group of rich black elite - all politically connected - receiving all government tenders and being invited by the big multi-nationals to become ‘partners’. What this partnership means is that these companies can now say they are BEE compliant and these new black partners get a fat check at the end of every month.

I promise you. I have heard this story many a time, often from the BEE partners themselves.

Sadly, this legislation only enriches this small group of already rich blacks, whilst the economic slowdown it causes negatively impacts those who need it most: the poor masses, be they black or white.

Also, those that are neither black nor white are bearing a very hard burden. During Apartheid they were discriminated against because they were not white, now they are discriminated against because they are not black. When will this absurdity end? Probably only when all the whites have left Africa, which may not be that far off in the future...

Time is my everything

2006-06-28T08:29:00.000+01:00

Following on from DCM’s post regarding the 25 most popular nouns, I thought it would be interesting to see how relatively popular those nouns are on Google. The table below ranks the 25 words from most to least popular (as purported by Oxford), and gives their Google hits and their rankings in terms of Google hits.

It’s quite interesting that there seems to be almost no correlation between the two ranks. Calculating the statistical correlation between the ranks yields a measly 0.11 (1 being perfect and -1 being perfectly opposite, and zero being no linear relationship), which is statistically insignificant. Will the correlation one day be 1?

Another interesting thread in the Top25 is the occurrence of words denoting periods of time or time itself, i.e. time, year, day and week. They make up a whopping 23% of all the Google hits above. Well, yesterday they did.

Gentlemen prefer blondes

2006-06-27T12:50:00.000+01:00

Generalisation is a critical survival instinct for the human species. Let’s imagine we have a friend Bob that lived thousands of years ago. Bob is having a bad day. A big lion just ate his friend Tommy, and this morning, another lion ate his girlfriend, Nell. Coincidence? Maybe, but just yesterday yet another lion ate his friend Peter. “I don’t like lions, they eat my friends”, he thinks to himself. But Bob, how can you say that? Do you know all lions? Aren’t you being an animalist? "Hmm, you’re right", says Bob, "I will give lions the benefit of the doubt." The next day Bob gets eaten by a lion while trying to feed it milk and cookies. Bob’s exact genetic makeup is lost forever. Which is good, because he was stupid.

And so a species prone to generalisation evolved over tens of thousands of years. It is only relatively recently in human history that generalizations have started to be frowned upon. What is the worst thing a person can be labelled as? A racist. You’re more likely to get away with murder. They should change the idiom to “he’s getting away with racism”. "Did you hear about that guy who allegedly murdered his wife, he’s getting away with racism."

Racism has been an important survival tool, just like other attempts of the human brain to categorize. For a long time it was perfectly acceptable to hate your proverbial neighbour, for the simple reason that, in a resource limited area, it was either you or them.

Racism is now considered the ultimate evil. White South Africans (with a lot of help from Cecil John Rhodes and English social engineers) inflicted Apartheid on blacks. This will forever be looked upon with disdain, while early US settlers’ conquering of Native Americans is still secretly considered by most US patriots to be a glorious conquering.

White South African leaders were not evil men. They simply believed that the ever-multiplying blacks would eventually kill them all. Let’s face it: by contemporary standards, black tribes were savages. Zulus sacrificed human life for the good karma of the tribe. Witchdoctors were the closest they had to medical science, and even today we have to put up with that mumbo jumbo. They routinely murdered each other, e.g. that fat traitor Dingaan cowardly assassinated Shaka, his own half brother and the greatest Zulu leader ever. One regularly hears about wonderful cultures past and present from across the world. Surely if you allow some cultures to be considered rich and fascinating, you must allow contempt of others?

Had blacks conquered South Africa and apartheid never happened, chances are the Afrikaans culture would have been lost (or at best scattered in puny clusters around the world), and South Africa would be in complete economic disarray. And blacks would be starving. Happy, but starving.

These are the facts. Facts that cannot ever be mentioned by the media, for they are too terrible and too true. They would result in less international sympathy and therefore less leverage in “the Struggle”. Make no mistake, the Struggle continues. The struggle will never end, because in their heart of hearts, average blacks long for the glory days of Shaka Zulu and other great black leaders, when they had a virtual god to believe in and fight for. Their struggle is against consensus modern civilisation.

Is there ever a justification for racism? How predominantly fucked up must a race/culture be before it is PC for me to say “Fuck it, I don’t lik’em”. The answer, apparently, is that you can never say that. Race is the ONE instance where you simply cannot have a preference. No matter how many babies get raped, farmers get killed, African countries get fucked up, or how many dearly loved fat cat black kings enfamish their peoples, you have to respect it. Even admire it.

Political correctness is the denial of reality in favour of prevailing ideology. The fact that black tribes would have slaughtered white folk one by one had they not devised a system to control the black masses doesn’t make any difference. The fact that blacks were arguably better off under white rule doesn’t change a thing. The fact that culturally-challenged blacks fucked up just about every country in Africa must never be uttered. White Afrikaners are evil because they stood up to barbarians and defended their culture, their way of living, which they valued above anybody else’s culture. So God yes they were racist.

To help make things make sense in my head, I have to generalize. Since my mind needs to process brutal murders, rapes, corruption and senseless violence, it yearns to generalize. In doing so, I hope the individual appreciates not being patronized.

Most commonly used noun

2006-06-27T12:02:00.000+01:00

Here is a list of the top 25.
Found on Marginal Revolution.

Werner Herzog and the Deeper Truth

2006-06-22T09:20:00.000+01:00

"Compared to the newer technological advances that enable us to experience, and participate in, art and culture (television on cell phones, MP3 players, blogging websites), the DVD format appears almost antique. The first DVD Players appeared in Japan in 1996, and in the U.S.A. the following year. Since then, DVD has usurped the VHS tape to become the dominant domestic format for watching movies and filmed entertainment.

Yet contained within DVDs is a technical feature that enhances our enjoyment and understanding of film to an unprecedented degree: these are the spare audio tracks that allow optional audio commentaries to be added. For hardcore cineastes — and bug-eyed amateur movie buffs like me — this is an invention of Guttenburgian proportions. Few technological advances in the realm of art and culture can equal the joy afforded by an articulate and perceptive commentary specially prepared to accompany a movie."

[Article]

tweeduisend-en-ses

2006-06-20T07:18:00.000+01:00

Die somer is verby die winter wil ek vermy
Ons is mense deurmekaar… 30 ook net daar
Party het daarin getrap terwyl ander wag vir die grap
Glo vinnig verby met bitter min wat oorbly

Soveel jaar terug is kinders afgemaai
In opstand teen die taal wat ek nou saai
Die dooies sou vandag die rollercoaster ry
Maar vir hulle was dit alles vroeg verby

In bitter heimweë is daar wel iets om te wys
Die meerderheid vind die land nou baie tuis
Dit laat almal uitsien na die vakansiedae
Vir die Ooste om ons besigheid weg te dra

2006-06-19T08:18:00.000+01:00

There is so much to fear. Just leaving the house seems a ridiculous risk. Unlocking your front door makes no sense at all.

The roads are filled with humans prone to idiocy and weakness behind massive metal husks moving at high and incongruous speed. I cannot in any way trust any human being behind any car, and whilst driving I have the sensation that I am doing something dumb and teenage.

Once I am in my car, I also fear stopping. I cautiously approach Stop signs and red lights, knowing through newspaper what cruelty and maiming could befall me at any moment. Somebody could run up to my car and shoot me in the head. I could survive with brain damage. People I meet would pity and loathe me and call me lucky.

Sometimes lying awake at night I think of how a man or men could enter my house. Rape my love and make me watch. Then I think no that’s paranoid. Then I remember this happens all the time.

I am so scared every day. There are all these people around me who I cannot understand. I cannot help them either, and nothing will come of any attempt. There are too many of them, too few of us, and they don’t want help, they want the power promised to them by their leaders and visionaries and egos and TVs.

So I stay locked away in fear.

Hector Pieterson

2006-06-15T15:33:00.000+01:00

I was recently involved in a conversation in which one of the participants did not know who Hector Pieterson was. The others proceeded to scold the shit out of him for his ignorance. What an idiot. I wouldn’t usually be that critical on someone, but in this case I have no choice: that someone turns out to be me.

Hector Pieterson was killed alongside 565 other school children on June the 16th 1976, while they were protesting the compulsory teaching of Afrikaans in their schools. The only difference between him and the others is that there was a photographer nearby to immortalize the image of his death.

Of all events we commemorate on public holidays, this one is surely one of the most poignant, right up there with the birth and death of your personal choice of a pseudo-God. If you’re not affected by 565 children being shot to death, you’re probably dead yourself. I suppose it's doubly apt that Youth Day commemorates these children, since even though they would now have been in their forties were they alive, they will be children forever.

Hector Pieterson. For me this is going to be one of those names/words/concepts that you go for years never even knowing it existed and then suddenly, when you learn of it, you hear it all the time. And then, one day, it comes up in conversation and a friend doesn’t know anything about it, and you take great pleasure in scolding the shit out of him.

God, what an ignoramus.

Zizek

2006-06-15T08:46:00.000+01:00

I just unearthed this interesting interview with Slavoj Zizek that took place a few months after 9/11. I like the part where he talks about Nietzsche's Last Man. It felt like he was talking directly about me:

"This post-political world still seems to retain the tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism versus multiculturalism. But for me - though I never liked Friedrich Nietzsche - if there is a definition that really fits, it is Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions"

There are no more struggles for me. Only self-satisfaction. The happier i am the more I ebb towards this pasive nihilism. The more I have the less I am prepared to die. I think this idea was also voiced in Barbarian Invasions, where the dying father says something about how the young are always ready to die for a cause, but the old has gotten used to life and are more unwilling to part with it.

At the moment it just feels like I am, and all my planning focusses on everyday and small improvements in the quality of my meaningless life, more The Man After The Last Man.

FW's rollercoaster ride

2006-06-15T08:07:00.000+01:00

Source: News24 (chronological from bottom to top)

About 12 years ago, a friend of my parents, who also happened to be an acclaimed journalist (he has since passed away), told us of an off the record meeting he had with FW de Klerk. It was long ago and I was very young, but I'll never forget one thing he said: that FW was very bitter about how he was cast aside after the post-Apartheid elections. The journo said he had lost all respect for FW, that he had become "a bitter old man".

FW de Klerk - adulterer, Apartheid-buster, token Nobel Peace Prize winner, bitter old man: the last of the great Afrikaans leaders.

Where have all the great Afrikaans leaders gone? Charismatic Afrikaans leaders are a dying breed (at best). As flawed as FW is/was, these days we have to endure spineless sycophantic sell-outs like Marthinus van Schalkwyk. I know jellyfish with more backbone and accountants with more charisma than that guy. If Paul Kruger were alive today, Marthinus van Schalkwyk would be dead today. The truth is that we (yes I’m Afrikaans) have been conditioned to believe that we are scum. We have lost all cultural pride and the great Afrikaans minds are not stepping up to the plate simply because they don’t believe in the Team anymore.

If I’m supposed to feel guilty about Apartheid, well sorry, I don’t. For the same reason I’m not personally ashamed that my parents used to listen to ABBA. This is a new generation: fuck the sins of our fathers for they are not mine, I will not take ownership. Until they pinpoint and isolate an undeniably responsible Apartheid genetic sequence, I will not apologize for anything.

The science of soccer

2006-06-13T09:06:00.000+01:00

New Scientist presents a round-up of their favourite science stories related to "the beautiful game". This article on silencing hooligan chants with a delayed echo machine looks like it belongs in The Onion.

And a robotic foosball table.

Woman hit by lightning while praying

2006-06-12T10:27:00.000+01:00

"DAPHNE, Ala. -- Worried about the safety of her family during a stormy Memorial Day trip to the beach, Clara Jean Brown stood in her kitchen and prayed for their safe return as a strong thunderstorm rumbled through Baldwin County, Alabama. But while she prayed, lightning suddenly exploded, blowing through the linoleum and leaving a blackened area on the concrete. Brown wound up on the floor, dazed and disoriented by the blast but otherwise uninjured. She said 'Amen' and the room was engulfed in a huge ball of fire. The 65-year-old Brown said she is blessed to be alive."

[link]

2006-06-08T16:11:00.000+01:00

mp3 of the week

2006-06-08T15:37:00.000+01:00

junior boys - in the morning

interesting article

2006-06-08T14:37:00.000+01:00

On groups

Planning on reading all of this guy's writings