One of the things that my mother and I have in common (apart from the fact that 50 percent of my genes come from her) is our love of certain writers.
Peter O'Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise, is probably at the top of the list. Less well known is that O'Donnell also wrote gothic historical romance novel under the female pseudonym Madeleine Brent.
Some thoughts on the occasion of the death of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:
A high-school friend who is a singer / songwriter shared a new composition with our class group yesterday. It's a very catchy jingle with its core theme in the chorus:
Is it one God or some religion
That everybody needs
Or do we shake those shackles off
And use reason as our belief
Some years ago, I drove from Johannesburg to Lüderitz on the Namibian coast for a friend’s wedding.
As I approached the town, the dysfunctional railway line which once linked Keetmanshoop to Bahnhof Lüderitz (as the Germans who built it in 1906 called it), frequently vanished under shifting desert sands. In the town, the station itself was derelict.
Construction of the railway line by the Germans took 9 months. Let me quote a well-documented historical account :
Yale Kamisar passed away 30 January 2022 aged 92. He was an American legal scholar and writer and Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Most of us have not heard of him, but his impact on the legal world was ground-breaking. He is known in legal circles as “Father of Miranda”.
If you’ve ever watched an American cop making an arrest on screen, you would probably have heard these words before:
After World War II, the British Empire confronted the law of diminishing returns with regard to their looting and pillaging of their colonial territories.
So, they pulled out, but divided those territories in a manner that was generally certain to provoke sectarian conflicts.
Some of these territories pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and became thriving secular states — India and Singapore being prime examples.
Some 21 years ago, when I was managing editor of the Cape Times, I had acquired as my desktop computer at work an Apple Power Macintosh G3 with its matching Sony Trinitron monitor.
It was both beauty and beast by the standards of the day; blue and white polycarbonate clocking in at 300 MHz. More importantly, it could effortlessly play the Star Wars Phantom Menace trailer which was the first movie trailer to debut on the Internet.
Driving my 12 year old daughter to school this morning, and the iPhone god of randomness popped by Shakara by Fela Kuti.
And I told 12 that Fela had been beaten to death by Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, and she asked why, and I said that's what dictators do. But that I would check my recollection and get back to her.
Actually, I had misremembered. It was not Sani Abacha; it was Abacha's predecessor General Olusegun Obasanjo. Fela was not beaten to death; merely close to death.
Fancy listening to Folk Music of Afghanistan from 1971? Or Afro-Cuban Jazz from 1966?
The Internet Archive has begun digitizing long out-of-print vinyl and making it freely available.
As I write these words, I am listening to "Profiles" by Gary McFarland (1966). It was post bop contemporary jazz at the time. Now, it's a half century old.
I found out this morning that "Mad Mike" Hoare had passed away on 2 February, aged 100.
