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/ 9 September 2008

Wanted: Comical Ali

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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/ 18 March 2005

Park of darkness

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.

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/ 17 March 2005

Viva Thuthuka

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.

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/ 17 March 2005

Exhibitionists, one and all

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.

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/ 11 March 2005

A new dictionary of received ideas (III)

"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.

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/ 4 March 2005

A new dictionary of received ideas (Part II)

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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/ 18 February 2005

You’ll never walk again

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

‘Don’t chase Zim invite’

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

Let’s kill all the lawyers

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

Bid farewell to the games we knew

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

Homecoming Devolution

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".

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/ 7 January 2005

Skop, skiet and soccer

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

Branded for life

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

Fame’s a beach

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

Ari Stotle and the philosopher’s moan

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.”

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/ 13 August 2004

Lowering your sites

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.

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/ 12 August 2004

Participation rates

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.

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/ 6 August 2004

No place like Homer

"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.

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/ 30 July 2004

Dear Martin …

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.

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/ 16 July 2004

The hell of Hellas

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.

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/ 1 July 2004

Ag shame

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.

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/ 18 June 2004

Jingle hells

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.

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/ 11 June 2004

Burning desire

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.

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/ 27 May 2004

Bafana can wing the World Cup

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.

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/ 14 May 2004

We’re nobody’s chum, do you hear?

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".