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/ 9 September 2008
What is sport, and who decides what counts as a sport? High school coaches will tell you that sport is fun, as they nick the heels of weeping 13-year-olds with a well-oiled sjambok called Wagter.
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/ 9 September 2008
Thirty days ago nobody had heard of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. Today everybody has a favourite “Comical Ali” one-liner. The Iraqi minister of information has spawned a T-shirt boom, websites and fan clubs. And why wouldn’t he? He is a gem, and one South African sport badly needs.
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/ 9 September 2008
For those who continue to bleat about unfair domination in sport, I have four letters: USSR.
The fag-end of a Cape Town summer is a bad-tempered swelter. The heat is frayed, its December esprit evaporated with the ice-cream and tourists. What remains is an exhausted, impatient shimmer of cracking tar and acres of council-planted kindling. On Sunday I took a slow boat through the choked backwaters of that sluggish, steaming, backward city.
Putting women at the forefront of scientific research has been one of the greatest challenges of the National Research Foundation (NRF). The object of the NRF is to support and promote research through funding, human resource development and the provision of research facilities, in order to facilitate the creation of knowledge, innovation and development in all fields of science and technology.
By far the most popular attractions each year at Sasol SciFest, the exhibitions are set to outdo themselves this year with the return of old favourites, some fresh young blood and the winners of last year’s best exhibit awards. Running each day of the festival, the exhibitions are open from 9am to 5pm. Entrance is free.
If you are too young to have learnt to spell the word “science”, don’t worry – Sasol SciFest has a special programme for children aged four to eight. Called the Playfair, participants can expect a different science experience each morning, from chocolate-making workshops to building radios.
"The audience was now openly hostile, its mute boredom transformed into a continuous murmur of discontent, like angry bees massing in the heat of summer. He thought he saw the glint of a dagger under a toga. It was time for the pontification to end. Just two more minutes, he thought, and plunged on -" Tom Eaton presents the final instalment of the Dictionary of Received Ideas.
The story so far: her hull holed by an iceberg, the ferry begins to sink. Todd and Janet declare their true feelings. DeShawn commits a faux pas when talk turns to prosthetic limbs and the Battle of Midway. The second instalment of the three-part sporting <i>Dictionary of Received Ideas</i> is presented, and the engine room floods.
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/ 25 February 2005
In 1911, Gustave Flaubert launched a valiant but vain broadside at the hypocrisy, doublespeak, platitudes and banality of the bourgeois chattering classes. Three years after the publication of <i>A Dictionary of Received Ideas</i>, World War I broke out. In 2005, Tom Eaton presents, in three parts over the next three weeks, a new dictionary of ideas.
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/ 18 February 2005
Those who attack American interests around the globe, who incite peaceful native populations to fanaticism and violence, and who undermine democracy must expect swift and decisive action by the United States and its military. This was the word from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday as she outlined her country’s plans to invade Manchester.
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/ 17 February 2005
Revelations that South Africa attempted to stop a Southern African Development Community (SADC) judicial delegation, declaring the mission “unnecessary”, have resulted in confusion about the country’s approach to the upcoming election in Zimbabwe. The legal team was meant to precede and inform a broader SADC observer mission.
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/ 5 February 2005
A few years ago a student of mine handed in a final-year essay containing the words “correlative”, “oeuvre” and “mandate”. Since I knew the author to be an intellectual pimple who considered literature to be the <i>Cosmo</i> horoscope, a quick Google search ensued. There, replicated across half a dozen sites, were the suspiciously erudite paragraphs. I failed it, reported the plagiarist, and forgot all about it. Until, that is, I was summoned to appear before a university tribunal.
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/ 28 January 2005
Sport is elitist. Anyone who wants to argue that toss needs to go two rounds with a pro fighter, and then we’ll see if fuzzy notions of universal brotherhood persist.
Sport tolerates no affirmative action. Those who are up to its challenges are affirmed; the rest are crushed like the no-hopers and also-rans they always were, writes Tom Eaton.
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/ 14 January 2005
Tom Eaton has met the brain drain. "He’s ghastly. He doesn’t challenge his world-view by reading newspapers (or reading anything, for that matter), so I could name him with impunity, but his real name doesn’t quite convey the flaccid provincialism that infects one’s first impression of him. He could be Shane or Chad or Brad or Steve, but for now let him remain Josh, perky and noxious".
Zimbabwe will host the 2012 Olympics or die trying. This was the word this week from President Robert Mugabe, as he officially endorsed his country’s bid to host the sporting spectacle.
The Department of Sport and Recreation, in collaboration with a leading pet food manufacturer, has announced that legislation to legalise greyhound racing will be introduced during the next parliamentary session.
The Sky News “Hijack Live” box was disappointingly immobile. As Rupert Murdoch fed the informational equivalent of white sugar to England’s lowest common denominator on his news channel, the picture-in-a-window resolutely refused to show anything resembling what broadcasters were calling “drama”. After 10 minutes a policeman had walked past, and the rolling billboard behind the bus on the dim Athenian street had changed 10 times.
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/ 26 November 2004
I drink Diet Coke. It makes me feel good. It helps me retain my boyish figure. It calms me down. It peps me up. It sings me to sleep at night. I love Diet Coke. I want Diet Coke. I need Diet Coke. Advertising people will say this is because of branding. Breweries, currently shacking up with fellow booze pimp Miller, seemed to have got branding down to a fine art. Until Justin Nurse and Laugh It Off.
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/ 24 September 2004
Short of admitting that you didn’t vote Democratic Alliance, there is no quicker way of being stricken from social rolls in Cape Town than to declare a loathing for beach-going. No longer does the phone ring with invitations to go to evening concerts at Kirstenbosch, where people are united by the common misery of having dew seep up through their underwear.
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/ 3 September 2004
Professor Bruce of the Philosophy Department at the University of Wallamalloo (Queensland), most famous for his theories on the drinking habits of Aristotle, would have succinctly described conditions in Athens last weekend, as the games came to a close, as: “It’s hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum.”
When International Olympic Committee (IOC) chief Jacques Rogge walks into a room and introduces himself, people instantly spring into action. This is because they think he’s choking to death on a herring-bone. But apart from having a glottal seizure for a surname, he is, by most accounts, a fairly popular fellow.
Sustainable economic development is dependent on an increasing supply of highly skilled people. Participation rates are an indicator of such a supply. Participation rates refer to the percentage of students who continue their studies after passing grade 12 – that is, students studying at higher education institutions as a percentage of students passing grade 12.
Pick up a book. Any one will do. Look at its binding. What’s on its cover? Where are the pages numbers (top or bottom)? What typeface does it use? We all handle books every day. Yet do we understand how these material features of books shape how we read them?
"I sing of arms and the man. And of his legs. Some toes, too. I sing of …" A thunderflash, the smell of singed hair, and the minstrel was no more. "These epics are just silly nowadays," said Zeus, cooling his finger in a vase. The water steamed and the last surviving lily turned brown. "Does my bum look big in this?" asked Apollo. He had bought a figure-hugging toga that morning.
For almost a decade, as Murray Walker indulged his dangerous liaisons with English idiom, Martin Brundle was the forgotten man of the ITV formula one commentary box. The eternal butler to the devilish seducer of mixed metaphors, the former racer swept up the split infinitives and polished the spoonerisms as Walker plunged ever deeper into linguistic notoriety and the hearts of his audience.
For too long science has overlooked the hillbilly. Perhaps fearing being tied to a tree and molested, anthropologists and sociologists have eschewed the deep woods, failing to draw back the mosquito net of secrecy that still obscures this remarkable tribe. Scratch the surface of the hillbilly, and we find little rolls of dirt and traces of antifreeze under our fingernails. Wash the surface and then scratch, and we find the story of humanity itself.
There is no torment of regret so fierce, no prostration abject enough, than those the moral columnist must undergo when he sees that his work has done cruelty to an entirely innocent party. Callous and cavalier, he has broken a true and honest heart, a heart that knew only love and hope before his cyanide paragraphs killed forever that irreplaceable spark of joy.
You want fan-song? Lovely fan-song, very clean? Hey, GI, five dorrar I give you long time fan-song, only five Merican dorrar. It sounds rude but not a little intriguing, some manner of red-light-district pork dish served on a bed of rice and cheap perfume. But then the music starts, and the hyphen falls away like orchid petals in the first gusts of a monsoon. Ugly and depressing, the fan song squawks to life, and sport settles a few inches deeper into the muck.
On the whole Rastafari are unflappable. Set fire to their hair, and they will admire the Catherine-wheel effect of hundreds of burning fleas jumping clear. But this week the Olympic Torch is in Cape Town, and if anything will get them hopping it is the sight of what seems to be a huge smoldering silver bong coming their way.
Last weekend I flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town on South African Airways, and I can recommend the experience to anyone. If you are a lobotomised deaf-blind dwarf with a stapled stomach, it is a marvellous way to spend two hours. It has become passé to complain about airlines and their tenuous grasp of anatomical realities, but somewhere over Kimberley I began to fantasise about kicking an SAA executive in the shin until he cried.
A media conspiracy unfolded this week. The facts — which we know to be true because they were printed in newspapers — include that
South African men are the laziest in the world, outslothing Muscovite pimps and Zimbabwean election monitors, and that Danny Jordaan is "the hardest-working man in South African football".