The Big Game was a victory for The Real Man and a crushing defeat for the illusion that we will ever admire anything as much as a good bit of bone-crunching. Sure, we’ll nod and smile in the general direction of the man wearing the Amanda Laird Cherry shirt and the baby carrier. Even rugby players appear in <i>GQ</i> and <i>Cosmo</i> Man spreads, wearing fine suits and not running into one another.

Despite growth in car use, most South Africans still use public transport and walk to get around, even though public transport is in a parlous state. The National Household Travel Survey, conducted in 2003, found that 38-million citizens live in households with no access to cars and that 40-million citizens do not have a driver’s licence.

Information technology has lived through hardware wars, software wars, operating system wars, browser wars and is now preparing for a new one. The spoils in this battle are your documents. As an increasing number of users are turning to the web for Microsoft Office-type capabilities, but without the Microsoft Office price tag, a battle is being waged to provide these services — and more.

Almost 80% of learners who registered for sector education and training authority learnerships did not finish their training courses, according to the department of labour’s latest implementation report on skills development. The report, released for the first time during last week’s national skills development conference, shows that only 16 507 out of 87 687 of the registered learners, mostly unemployed youth, completed their training from April 2005 to March 2007.

For those who take their lead from the old ideologies that sought to shape this country and failed so abysmally, the very idea of a Black Management Forum was and remains a cheeky notion — for blacks can only be drawers of water and hewers of wood. If black management generically were to fail, that Verwoerdian postulation would rise triumphantly from the graveyard of racial ideology, writes Bheki Khumalo.