Mail & Guardian column
Stuff that matters (M&G)
Friday, September 19th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column | No Comments
Give me a pearly white smile! There you go. Now consider this: the calcium in your teeth was cooked up inside a giant red star, billions of years ago. So were the iron in your blood and the carbon in your genes.
In fact much of the stuff that makes up you and me was made in those cosmic laboratories a long, long time ago. That’s how astronomer Carl Sagan put it. We’re made of “star stuff”.
Sipping tea with the devil (M&G)
Friday, September 5th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column | No Comments
“How’ve you been?”
“Not too bad, thanks. Bit under the weather today. Things’ve been busy!”
Beelzebub, Lord of Darkness, flops back into the couch, flicks off her mules and curls her feet under her.
“You’ve changed your hair,” I say, “I like the grey. Honest hair. Tea?”
Nods, and reaches for my notepad.
“‘How do we know what we know,’” she reads, and rolls her eyes. “Oh god, you’re not getting existential on us?”
Fairy-tale princesses and Olympic fakes (M&G)
Friday, August 22nd, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column | 1 Comment
Cinderella was a money-grabbing trollop who used her looks to weasel her way up the social ladder. Or she was just a lucky kid who got the “hot” genes, the kind that sculpted a face which would catch the eye of the most powerful guy in the room. Either way, her glorious visage got her a seat in the royal throne room.
But the insinuation throughout the fairy tale is that the petite-footed, flaxen-haired, cinder-streaked bombshell was as flawless in moral fibre as she was of feature; that she was virtuous and pure and thus worthy of being fairyland’s first lady. Her gnarled, stout, ugly sisters were the exact opposite, the embodiment of everything that is mean, wretched and evil. They were as dreadful in character as they were in countenance. › Continue reading
Stormy weather (M&G)
Friday, August 8th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column, climate change | 1 Comment
How many global citizens does it take to change an incandescent light bulb to something more energy-efficient? None, apparently, because the light bulb doesn’t need changing.
The dissident view of climate change is growing in popularity as the media continue to thrash out both “sides” of the story: the Earth may be warming, but it’s not our fault. Projections aren’t nearly as dire as the alarmists tell us. So sit back, everyone, and enjoy the sunshine.
This approach assumes there are two sides of the story — which just shows how vast the gulf is between climate scientists and those of us who aren’t privy to the reams of discombobulating data and models on which climatologists build their projections. › Continue reading
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
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
A more beautiful game is possible (M&G)
Friday, June 27th, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column | No Comments
The air is prickly with tension. The tail end of a sentence, barked by a souped-up coach, gets muffled as it ricochets down the length of a carpeted hallway. New gusto to the old pre-match pep-talk. Across the way the other team meditates, some heads drooped under towels. One or two athletes stretch their quads and glutes. Both teams are ready — Lycra leotards stretched over lean, sinuous bodies; cheeks ruddy with rouge; hair taut and pinned; satin shoes bound in place; tutus puffed out, flirting and audacious. › Continue reading
To breed or not to breed (M&G)
Monday, June 2nd, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column | No Comments
I wake with a snort, roused by the clatter of a ballpoint pen hitting the floor. It spins idly to a halt, put there by the same peaches-and-cream striped paw now tapping one end of it. How easily the modern quill is reduced to a plaything!
Blink, blink, blink.
The cursor on my computer screen winks expectantly. Above it, the line: To breed or not to breed.
Blink, blink, blink.
Goblins in the cupboard (M&G)
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column, rational thought | No Comments
According to an arcane superstition pre-dating the Enlightenment, I can be a bitch at times. We all can, now and then, but my predisposition was determined by the position of our sun in relation to a specific arrangement of celestial bodies a few hundred light years away, at the time of my birth. If, like me, you came bellowing into this world in late October or most of November, you’re the bearer of grudges and have an almighty sting in your tail. You can’t help it, you’re a Scorpio.
Our relationship with the night skies may have started with astrology — that tottering, nappy-bummed imp that was the early observing human — but since Galileo and Newton we’ve graduated to a more mature relationship with the heavens. › Continue reading
Sex up science (M&G)
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column | No Comments
fffzzzzzzz…zzzz…zzz… THUP!
A projectile the size of a child’s fist shot across the lawn and buried itself in a crouching rhododendron bush. It was summer in the early 1980s and we kids were home from school. My brother, his head crammed with potions learned in the science class, had cobbled together a handful of innocuous kitchen ingredients and turned them into something entirely more volatile.
The receptacle for this weapon of minimal destruction was our mum’s lovely ceramic vinegar jar, the projectile was its cork stopper. › Continue reading
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