Scorched

The immovable power of flimflam (M&G)

Friday, July 25th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column, rational thought | No Comments

I have decided to become a fairaeologist — one who studies fairies. I believe I see fairies. I’m sure they exist. So I start a journal, printed and bound at my local copy shop, called the Journal of Advanced Fairaeotics (JAF).

I get a few mates, also fairy believers, to be my “peer reviewers”. I sit up all night with a torch and reckon I see a petite-winged fairy dancing in the moonlight across the daisy heads. I write up my observations, explain my methods, discuss my findings, all of which are published in the JAF: › Continue reading

Tags: metaphysics, pseudoscience, quantum, The Secret

Dusting off yesterday (M&G)

Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column, history | No Comments

When you’re a youngster, music has a way of becoming communal. Well, it did when I was a teenager, which is why it didn’t matter that I never owned a tape deck in the Eighties. I had my roving box of tapes and there was always someone with a boom box.

Some of those cassettes were R6,99 blanks picked up at the local stationer, recycled through the shifting music du jour that backlights the changing seasons of capricious adolescence. Their white labels carried wiggly, hand-written artist names: Simon & Garfunkel or Magna Carta, scratched into the Tippex painted over a previous album name; gloomy Depeche Mode jettisoned Alice Cooper; Pink Floyd, the perennial favourite. › Continue reading

Tags: history

Memories of a human heart (M&G)

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 | narrative journalism | No Comments

It’s an ordinary page, from an ordinary diary. “Dates that matter”, printed in the top right corner. Important dates for January in an unnamed year. Dates that never needed filling in. There’s also space for notes, but the lines are blank. The owner of this diary didn’t care for the prescriptions of its publisher. Her hand, probably inspired by the same wistful romance in her favourite Barbara Cartland novels, gave the page over to a ballgown, scrawled in a scarlet pencil.

Square neck, broad straps, deep pockets angled over the hips. Black trim here and there. Eleven neatly spaced buttons down the front. An exaggerated clinch in the waist. Denise Darvall was a regular 20-something when she sketched that dress, an everyday bank employee, a woman hoping for love and a chance to wear a ballgown. › Continue reading

Tags: Groote Schuur, heart transplant, museum

Dawn of the ordinary hero (Extra Virgin)

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 | uncategorized | No Comments

Before Madiba became the father of the nation, he was an ordinary kid growing up in the Transkei, an every-day undergraduate, a first-time activist. Every (super)hero has to start somewhere, with the smallest act of justice. This month our intrepid science writer dons some lycra and dares to separate out the kitchen waste. Leonie Joubert is… Waste Girl!

I’ve always hated recycling. It’s a bloody schlep. First, there’s half a Saturday lost to the shopping trip to pick up four bins (for plastic, glass, paper, tin) and compost bucket (which retails for a staggering R500 at my local garden shop), then the search for physical space to put them, and, which is no easier to find, the head space to actually think before binning something. On top of all of that, there’s the weekly trip to the recycling depot. › Continue reading