So what do you think about Top Gear — the BBC’s motoring show featuring the irrepressible Jeremy Clarkson and his two much-abused sidekicks? The programme is irreverent and boorish, it’s offensive, it’s insensitive to the feelings of minorities and, ultimately, it has little to do with mainstream motoring journalism because Clarkson and company never let…
There’s one very good reason why we could never reinstate the death penalty in South Africa, and it has little to do with the Constitution as far as I’m concerned. It’s simply that we couldn’t properly trust or control a state killing machine capable of churning its way through the tens of thousands of brutal,…
It’s always struck me as rather odd the way ANC politicians and public servants seem obsessed with security. Surely, as democratically elected representatives of the people they should feel free to walk in the streets without let or hindrance? The much-hated apartheid hierarchy were certainly nowhere near as paranoid about being assassinated as our supposedly…
So here we go. In the 1990s we had Kitsburghers (instant citizens) who could vote in the referendum, followed by Kitskonstabels (hastily half-trained policemen to help in the fight against crime). Now we have Kitsgeregtigheid, or instant justice, to ease the way during Fifa’s subjugation of our fair land. Steal a cellphone on Monday morning,…
Imagine this. You’re a youngster playing a minor club game of football in Boksburg when a man dashes on to the field during a lull in play and asks if you’d like to play for Liverpool. You wonder if he’s for real, but, of course, accept. A few weeks later, on the other side of…
As I labour away at my keyboard I can hear excited Englishmen on Sky News babbling on in the background about a much-needed revamp of British gun laws. Good! If the law is changed so as to make guns more accessible to the ordinary Englishman the authorities could in future warn him about the eruptions…
TO: Federation Internationale de Football Association Fifa-Strasse 20, PO BOX 8044 Zurich, Switzerland Att: Mr Sepp Blatter FROM: Gavin Foster 25 March 2010 Good morning Mr Blatter I know you’re a very busy man, what with checking that nobody makes any money from the World Cup without giving your organisation a fat chunk of it,…
If it were up to me, every single book ever written about “parenting” would be burnt and its author shot. I brought my kids up by following three basic maxims: never make a threat you can’t keep, always treat children like ordinary little people, and lie to them as much as you can — that’s…
It took a very special kind of mind to conjure up the idea of introducing a scatological theme into the nativity scene. Somewhere, sometime in the distant past, an anonymous Spaniard said to his mates, “I know how to brighten up our display. Let’s put the queen around the side of the stable.” Somebody else…
So Gareth Cliff is insensitive for speaking ill of the dead. We should obviously now accept the word of the ANC that Manto Tshabalala-Msimang didn’t use her influence to hijack a donor liver from somebody who’d been waiting much longer than she had, and the stories about her kleptomania were surely contrived by her political…
