I woke to the news that Sidney Poitier had passed away and had an immediate flashback to my pre-adolescence when I saw "In the Heat of the Night". It was a 16mm print projected onto a bedsheet in someone's house. (This was South Africa in the height of grand apartheid in the early 70s.)
Still on the subject of New Year resolutions:
On that last point, ask yourself whether you should be taking advice from financial journalists who will never be able to afford to retire.
I've never been one to make New Year resolutions, but it's one of those questions that almost everyone asks me when exchanging greetings. So, I decided to take a bugbear and turn that into a resolution.
I want a new pair of shoes.
It's not a complicated ask; except it is. I want shoes that are comfortable that I can wear every day with minimal maintenance. Now, the simple act of finding my shoe size (10½ in old school measure) is pain because no major retailer in South Africa carries half sizes these days.
I was in Beijing in 2017 and came close to being wiped out by a scooter. The previous time I visited China's capital, this would not have happened, because I would have heard it coming. This time, I did not, because the scooter was electric, and almost completely silent as a result.
I've been thinking about this a lot in the years since during my frequent visits to the bush (as we South Africans generally refer to our Big 5 game reserves).
Driving home this evening, I came across a sight which is not unfamiliar to my fellow South Africans: cars parked on the side of the road with "for sale" signs and numbers to call.
Neither of them had a price tag.
My fellow South Africans, help me understand, why do we do this?
It’s the new year. I see a lot of y’all pouring your hearts out on various platforms about your desire to extricate yourself from Covid-induced self-gratification. Not to worry; I have the two-step solution right here:
That's it.
Driving into Gauteng this evening with a magnificent thunderstorm in full glory over Johannesburg in the distance, and (of course), my fellow Gatties,1 at the slightest hint of a cloudburst, slow to a crawl in the fast lane of the freeways, and put on their hazard lights.
If you know the type of person who puts on their hazards during a storm, do they know that’s really stupid? Here’s what you should tell them:
If you’re visiting any of South Africa’s magnificent game reserves and look down, chances are you will see one these: Scarabaeus Zambesianus is the African Dung Beetle, and its lot in life is to find a mound of fæces, roll it a couple of hundred metres from where it was dumped, and bury it in an underground chamber. The beetle lays an egg in the ball which hatches into larva which feeds on the dung. The larva turns into a pupa, the pupa hatches into a new beetle which goes out into the world in search of more dung…
Have you ever heard someone says something that sounded completely outrageous, and you turned around to see a smile on their face and heaved a sigh of relief?
Humans rely on a wide range of signals to communicate with each other, and most of these are non-verbal: What we say is modified by pitch and loudness of voice, body language, hand gestures, and facial expression.
Written communication has none of those signals, so letter writing was very formal and structured to avoid miscommunication:
"Dear so and so...
Even after his death, there continues to be outrage — deserved, in my opinion — around Jeffrey Epstein's 36 recorded counts of sexual abuse. Some of his victims were 14 years old.
But this is 2020, and even well-meaning people commenting on the matter get taken to task, for example, this:
