It is interesting to watch the winds of change, as it were, blowing through the Middle East and how all the different leaders deal with it. The Libyan response has probably been the most predictable – bringing in plane loads of mercenaries allegedly from African countries, and then strafe your own people with machine gunfire killing literally hundreds. The bottom line is that that kind of approach generally works, and while the recent events may make me look foolish in a few days’ time, I would not be surprised by using outright violence, Col Gadhafi survives as leader of Libya.

He is well aware of the pattern that once you follow the instructions and pleas of the rest of the world to stop killing your own people that they gather in increasing numbers, until you are forced to resign as has happened in the other countries. It is amazing, and very sadly so, that while Tripoli burns, Gadhafi still has a lot of credibility in the African Union.
 

The latest research, and some of it was published in the New York Times, indicates that blogs are becoming less and less popular – with most people choosing to communicate via 140 characters or so on Twitter of on Facebook. Blogs will remain relevant for those who have a desire to communicate more than can be communicated in 140 characters and as another person put it, by those who have an interest in communicating more than just the fact that they are now going to the shops. There is no doubt though, to keep a blog relevant and to keep the visits up, is a greater challenge now than it was three or four years ago and that one needs to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to promote one’s articles.

The Golf Digest’s annual edition featuring the top 100 golf courses in South Africa, as rated by them, is out later this week, and many golfers will be awaiting the results with great interest. It can have an impact on values of properties and the leading residential golf estates, for example, and there is also always the desire by most golfers to have played at least most of the top 10 golf courses. Compleat Golfer, in a recent review of Leopard Creek, said that the top golf course in the country was between Leopard Creek, the Gary Player course at Sun City and Blair Atholl, and it will be interesting to see what Golf Digest comes up with.

I assume that we are probably going to be told that there was a pilot error involved in the Italtile plane crash, but it is always horrific when we read these stories, and they always seem to involve small planes, going into small airports, in bad weather conditions.
I was quite terrified myself, some years ago, when an advocate was flying me in his plane, and the Pilansberg Airport signed off at 6pm indicating from then on you had to fly yourself in without any assistance from the control tower as to any other planes in the area! Imagine if the weather is poor? That is a risk you will always be taking when flying on smaller planes and certainly into smaller airports, where the staff members don’t necessarily work 24 hours.
 

I think a huge percentage of people in Johannesburg were tired after the U2 concert. I was very impressed by the huge and magnificent stage, and of course they are a polished band of performers who, even if they are signing old songs, make for very good entertainment.

The crowd was huge, apparently in the region of 110 000 people and certainly the FNB Stadium was more packed than its previous record when the ground held the New Zealand v South Africa rugby match. I got out of the Stadium easily and got there very easily as well because I left at the last minute to go to the Stadium, but I do understand a lot of people had absolutely traffic nightmares arriving and especially leaving.
 

In December, I lost a friend, Charlie Mnisi. Charlie was a former President of the Law Society of the Northern Provinces and very involved in the legal profession. He was always my partner at the Law Society golf days, except last year November, when I could not make the event, and a month later he fell down some stairs and died two days later.

I will always remember Charlie as a smiling, happy man who always had his copy of the Mail & Guardian close to him on a Friday at Council meetings and who never took things too seriously. At the halfway house at Country Club Johannesburg or CCJ as some call it, while the marshall chased the rest of us off to the tee, as they usually do, saying our breakfast break was over, Charlie simply continued to finish his breakfast and then ambled down to the tee when he was finished a few minutes later, a smile on his face and not a concern in the world, after the rest of us had already played off.
He was not going to be rushed and he was very relaxed and none of the pressure of the marshall or anybody else affected him and that was his nature. Another tragic loss and another family robbed of a father and a husband, and just a reminder to all of us that you really don’t know how long, at any given time, you have left on this earth.
 

All the roads are going to lead to FNB Stadium this Sunday for the U2 concert. I am sure a lot of people are very excited and I no doubt will also be, once I am in the grounds.

Driving back, along the congested routes of the World Cup on a Sunday evening does not appeal to me, and I see that the trains are going to be running on the way back, at 11h40. I took the train during the World Cup on one of the occasions and that was a mistake, because it was slower than going by car, much more cramped and quite hot – and that was in the middle of a cold winter.

The fact that the trains are scheduled to start at 11h40 means that the concert is obviously timed to end around about then, with the result that about 110 000 people are going to be hitting the roads just before midnight, with more congestion on the way home and an awful lot of tired people that work on Monday! In any event, let me not sound far too old and grumpy, just because I am not excited at a 2 hour journey there and probably an hour on the way home to listen to a band who, to be harsh, last had relevance 20 years ago, when their music was much more cutting-edge than the topics they sing about now, such as a “beautiful day”! I loved the U2 of Joshua Tree – With or without you or before that Sunday, bloody Sunday. They sang of politics and issue and now, they sing of a bit of love and lovely days. Certainly I will be more keen to hear the older songs because I think that while that was not the height of their popularity with the public at large who obviously prefer more middle of the road music, it certainly was for me.
 

There were a number of advertisements this past weekend for the toll fees that are going to be charged on all the highways around Gauteng, at approximately 66c a kilometre. At 66c a kilometre, people are really going to incur high charges fairly quickly, and for many who may use the highways to get to work, it is really going to be an added tax.

It is one thing if a new road is built and paid for by toll, but it always offends one if a road you have been using all the time, suddenly becomes a toll road and you are advised that this is going to ease congestion. How is it going to ease congestion? Is everyone going to stop using it because you now have to pay 66c a kilometre and for those who now pay, congestion will be eased? Quite frankly, I think that is absolute nonsense, and I cannot imagine that suddenly the highways are going to get faster. What they may have meant to say was that the money you are paying to use your already congested highway, may lead to another highway being built somewhere else, which will reduce congestion there, but the actual motivation and argument seems like nonsense and it really just gets down to being yet another tax on people who are already paying too much.
 

With companies in America, like Netflix, allowing you for $9 a month to download, directly to your TV, all the movies you want to watch, the DVD/Video shops are only a few more years away from its end. Who wants the inconvenience of going to a video shop that is always filled with strange characters popping in like the last time I was there a person in a raincoat looking like a pimp with one of his girls draped all over him.

It is one thing to actually choose a DVD and get through the process but the worst part is having to return the next day and drop it off somewhere at a certain time. That type of inconvenience simply will not survive in this modern technological world, and it is only a matter of time before we get a download service in South Africa. The movies and distribution companies should hurry as well, because if you can download all the movies you want legitimately for approximately R63,00 a month in America, you would basically put an end to piracy.

Who would have the time to search the Internet for illegal copies of movies, then spend hours downloading them only to discover that you have the Italian version, or a corrupted version, or which was shot at the back of a cinema by somebody holding a shaky camera. Giving people the “as much as you like” approach for a set fee invariably works, as it does not nightclubs with their “drink as much as you like” nights, and it will certainly eliminate almost all piracy.

There are many businesses out there, and sometimes we forget that education and selling degrees is also a business field and it will continue whether attorneys are getting paid well or not, or whether they find jobs or not, as long as there is a demand by people to become attorneys. I read an excellent article in the New York Times, headlined, “Is Law School a Losing Game?” recently and it basically had professors of the various Law Schools admitting that the figures are manipulated.

Those figures are the most important ones – how many of their students find jobs afterwards, and what their average earnings are. For example, they admitted that as long as a law student found a job waiting tables, that counted as a job and they would then indicate to all potential law students that that is one of the people who successfully found a job after going through Law School. Of course, you can quite easily become a waiter, as I was when I was a student, without studying in the first place. On this basis they manage to now indicate that 93% of all American law graduates are working, but they are not necessarily working as lawyers. To quote the article, “Number–fudging games are pandemic, Professors and Deans say, because the fortunes of Law Schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think as Law Schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it. They are also cash cows … So much money flows into Law Schools, that Law Professors are among the highest paid in academia, and Law Schools that are part of Universities often subsidise the money-losing fields of higher education.” It never ceases to amaze me, while one in South Africa witnesses, on a yearly basis, the legal profession come under more and more threat, how the number of people studying for legal degrees only increases.

In a few years’ time, there will be a record number of lawyers chasing what is probably the smallest amount of work ever available for lawyers in this country. In England, they have now allowed supermarkets to hire lawyers and to have, if they want, a lawyer sitting in the entrance of the shop dishing out general advice, and I will not be surprised if that is the way that many, who actually get jobs in law, will work in a decade or so in South Africa also. The system is simply feeding too many lawyers into an economy and field with reducing work and at least one lawyer, who I knew who could not find sufficient work to make it in private practice, has now become a lecturer at a Law School.
 

I love what the Internet has done, in terms of allowing us all access to information, more than we could ever read or imagine, but it does come with some drawbacks. I find that I am always troubled by the abuse that many people choose to give under anonymous user names or false names, and these people, whom I would refer to as trolls, running all over the Internet, looking for horrible things to say about different people, really have flourished on the Internet.

It is sad that the price we have to pay for so much extra freedom and information is to allow the vitriol and poison of some to now be so widely read. Anybody who writes a blog will find jealous people who have a few snide or nasty comments from time to time, but worse than that, is we have recently witnessed in America, some of the more poisonous attacks do seem to affect the warped minds and in particular with the result that, before you know it, politicians and all sorts of other people have been shot at shopping centres and very quickly politicians, and any of those who put up all the inflammatory comments in the first place, are quickly denouncing any actions based on what they said, and totting out the usual arguments about it’s a person who fires the gun that is the killer and those that write poison that influence such killers are not responsible.

I really wish there was some sort of way to try and ensure some sort of accountability, for those who publish and distribute hate speech and in addition, if it were possible, and I don’t see that it is, to try and eliminate the anonymous publishers. I guess you could raise political concerns against that argument also, bearing in mind that in many countries people do not have the freedom to say what they need to and in others, they clearly abuse that freedom by essentially inciting others to consider people as legitimate targets, simply because of their political stance.
 

Every time there is another shooting in America, I am once again amazed to read how liberal their laws are for guns. It seems that everybody is entitled, in half the States in the country, to carry a semi-automatic weapon, to carry it concealed and all of this is protected, allegedly, by their Constitution! In some areas you are even allowed to take guns into bars and I cannot imagine what types of lunatics in their legislature don’t understand that men, alcohol and guns are a particularly poor cocktail!

One wonders, with them having a President assassinated every 20 years or at least an attempt on a President’s life, not to mention the congress woman who has recently been shot, and all of their school massacres, when they will eventually get around to accepting that in a proper democracy you really don’t need to carry a hidden gun everywhere you go to “protect your rights”.
 

Super Sport has sent out the good news that this year’s Formula 1 will be broadcast live in high definition. Formula 1 management has confirmed that an HD feed will be available for the 2011 season to all of the sports host television broadcasters. The Tour de France later this year will also be broadcast in HD, so there is clearly no stopping the HD tide and those sets are going to start flying out of the stores!