I have invariably struggled with electric shavers over the years, but I found that the latest shaver from Philips Norelco, namely the SensoTouch 3D, is by far the best electric or battery shaver I have ever used. It is always useful to have an electrical or battery operated shaver, because in a rush you can get past all the hassles of water, shaving cream and the general amount of time shaving takes and so I am hoping that my skin does not get too irritable with it in long-term testing.
Incidentally, I saw that the European price was approximately R3 000,00, whereas in America it sells for approximately R1 300,00 and it would be interesting to see the pricing when it is officially released in South Africa.
 

Smart phones, with their capabilities these days, are eliminating and endangering a vast array of different products. We have recently read of the closure of Flip video cameras, partly inspired by the fact that almost every second phone these days has a video camera feature, but Smart phones are also eliminating watches, because nobody really needs a watch for the time anymore, portable GPS tracking devices, cameras as well as calculators.

It is very exciting that we will have a World Golf Championship event in South Africa next year. A $10 million purse, and a tournament known as the Tournament of Hope, will be tremendously exciting, bringing as it will, the best players in the world to South Africa.
Hopefully the Nedbank Golf Challenge will move to a week later, and they might even attract more of the world’s talent, if they are already in South Africa for the event the week before. It is a huge compliment to South Africa that we are getting a World Golf Championship event before Australia or Europe get one, and it will only be the second WGC event outside of America.
 

The bodyguards that have been accompanying Julius Malema to Court had really overdone the protection routine! I very much doubt anybody needs as many security guards as he takes with him to Court, and carrying the deadly M14 rifles seems somewhat ridiculous. Apart from that, having a gun in Court is against the regulations and the Firearms Control Act says that no person may carry a firearm in a public place unless the firearm is carried in a holder designed, manufactured or adapted for the carrying of the firearm.

If you enjoy excellent acting, then “The Fighter” is certainly a movie you have to see. Christian Bale won the award for best supporting male actor in this movie as did Melissa Leo for best supporting female actress. Both of them are superb and whoever did the casting of the family of the fighter in the title, did a superb job, because they are so superb at looking and playing the role of trailer park white trash, that I kept thinking that they had fetched them at a trailer park and that no actress could be that good!

One must not forget that Christian Bale made the news only a year or two ago for his ranting about, “Who do you think you are” at a cameraman on the Batman set, and you must appreciate for Hollywood to forget and overlook that so quickly, the performance truly has to be brilliant and indeed it is. I absolutely loved the movie, it had wonderful acting and I would strongly suggest you get it on Blue-Ray or DVD when it is released if you did not get a chance to see it at the cinema.
 

Serengeti golf course won the Golf Digest award for the best new golf course in 2010, and after my lightning experience in December I did not return until a recent Sunday. Serengeti is one of the courses to have essentially chased away the caddies, which means you have nobody to help spot your ball, or indeed rake your bunker, and that is probably the only negative I could find about the course.

The greens are wonderful and although bumpy and tricky, the roll beautifully and you can trust the line that you hit the ball on. It is a visual treat, and it is one of the few estates where building still seems to be going on, and it seems to be commercial success. The clubhouse is splendid, very impressive and the breakfast I had there would put to shame most golf courses. I also like their scorecard which allows you to see what the score was for the first 9. It is of course a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course and while it is a bit out of the way, it has certainly ready access to the highway and to OR Tambo Airport.
 

My wife snapped the accompanying photograph at a popular casino recently, and I thought it epitomised modern dating. I have blurred the man’s face but the couple, who appeared to be waiting for their first course, are both merrily typing away on their own cell phones busy with their SMS’s and all the usual things couples seem to do these days, rather than talk to each other!

This weekend sees most Golf Clubs in Gauteng holding their Club Championships, and so there will be many who will have dreams of success, perhaps inspired by Charl Schwartzel’s results in the Masters, and who will have been practicing quite hard this week. 

It is always exciting to take part in an event, no matter what your level of expertise is, and it will be lots of fun for everybody who does take part, regardless of how quickly their hopes of victory are dashed!  

It is about time South Africa started taking a tougher line with the dictator to the north of us. The one thing that always impresses me about Robert Mugabe is that he seems to have his wits about him, which is not always common for 80 plus year old leaders. How the Zimbabweans never took him out of power years ago however is a mystery to me. The man has singlehandedly destroyed their country. We have half the population of Zimbabwe working in Johannesburg, largely illegally, and our economy and that of the whole region, as well as the political confidence, has suffered during the last decade or so during which Mugabe has made one disastrous decision after another that has led not only to the economy crumbling, but also food production dropping and those outside of the prosperous Harare suffering.

It is tremendous for another South African, only three years after Trevor Immelman, to win the most prestigious golf tournament in the world, the Masters. While we are not tremendously good at cricket, golf is a sport that South Africans excel at, and we win more than our fair share of tournaments relative to our population. 

Even nicer, the fact that he is a wonderful guy, who I have seen taking part in the Friday competition at Blair Atholl on two or three occasions this year, and have had occasion to chat to.  He seemed extremely modest, was usually with his dad and Blair Atholl now has the distinction of being designed by a player who won the Masters, namely Gary Player, and having the current holder of the green jacket, namely Charl Schwartzel, living there.  I wonder if there is any other golf estate in the world that could boast two Masters champions? 

One of the joys of having the colder weather back will be to get rid of the mosquitoes. You end up having to sleep with all your windows closed and all sorts of artificial smoky things, to try and avoid being eaten alive by mosquitoes in summer. Of course, as time goes by, the threat will be more than just an irritation because Johannesburg is projected to be a malaria area by 2050, so one will have even more reason to be scared of mosquitoes then.

I was very happy to see that Multichoice has at least yet another new HD channel and it is another sports channel! That is exciting for me and for those who watch golf, because golf often gets a back seat to other sports, and they are also live on HD and it is going to be fabulous to have an extra channel so that there is more HD coverage of more sports. All sports, including horseracing are eventually going to have to broadcast in HD because that is going to be the requirement of the viewing public and regardless of what the cameras cost, and the cost of filming in HD, it is quite clearly no longer the future, but the present and it is going to become the bare minimum quite soon.

The Masters will be coming to a close this Sunday, and it is the first major of the year and the biggest major of the year. It would be interesting to see whether Tiger Woods will be in contention or who of the players are in with a shout, but I certainly hope that SuperSport will be showing it live this year because in previous years it has been shown “delayed live”. It is quite upsetting to be able to search on the Internet and discover a result, when you are watching TV and there is a live logo and you think it is happening at that time, but in fact it happened an hour or two earlier!

My brother and I had to fly to Durban recently for different meetings, and he arranged to fly via Kulula from Lanseria and I arranged to fly via SAA from OR Tambo. I explained to him that it was because I’ve had far too many problems with delays on Kulula flights in the past. As luck would have it, flights from every destination on the way to Durban were delayed because there was an electrical storm.

My SAA flight however was still delayed for a shorter time frame than his Kulula flight and on the way back, when there was no storm of any type, my flight left on time and landed 10 minutes early whereas his Kulula flight arrived 3 hours later. It seems that the longer the day wears on, the more their flights run behind time and quite frankly I would rather pay more, and travel further, than to fly with an airline that does not run as many delays or as lengthy delays.
 

The King’s Speech won the Oscar for the best movie and I recently had a bit of spare time and a chance to see it. It immediately made me think of Frost/Nixon because it is very much a two-man type of movie, with a tremendous interplay between the two lead characters.

It was superbly acted, well scripted and very enjoyable as well as informative, to realise that the current Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, had a father who had a terrible stammer and could hardly speak and was a tremendously brave man who had lots of training and managed to overcome the problem. The movie is essentially about his overcoming that problem and his relationship with the man who taught him a variety of techniques to get over that stammer.
 

It is amazing how much of business today comprises around making us want more or making us believe something is bigger or better than the previous version. Golf is no different and manufacturers have convinced golfers that their new ranges of clubs hit the balls further than ever, so that, for example, today’s pitching wedge hits the ball further than the pitching wedge designed five years ago.

The technology may be better, but just as with all aspects of business, so much of what we see seems to be about tricks and fooling us, golf manufacturers have simply decreased the loft of the clubs, thus making clubs hit the ball further, and so what we effectively know as a pitching wedge today, and which we think hits the distance of a 9-iron a few years ago is because that pitching wedge now has the same specifications as the 9-iron with the result that really you are hitting a 9-iron, but now it is labelled as a pitching wedge.

We think the technology is amazing, but in some respects all that has happened is that the label on your 9-iron which used to go further than a pitching wedge, is now changed to a pitching wedge!
 

The Consumer Protection Act finally came into force on 1 April 2011. It is going to fundamentally change the way we deal with retailers, airlines and no doubt it will have an impact on attorneys too. Consumers in South Africa now have more rights than consumers in most countries of the world and it will certainly be interesting to see how the first few legal cases go, and also to see how this impacts on the cost of doing business. If, for example, companies cannot handle problems the way that they used to, or they cannot overbook flights anymore, it presumably is going to have an affect on the bottom line and it is going to lead to increases in certain categories and for certain types of services where they will now have to cater for additional refunds for flights running at, for example, perhaps a smaller profit.

I get approached by clients and potential clients on a daily basis to help them in fields of law in which my firm does not specialise. In my opinion, and while I accept some people truly are very talented and can do almost anything, I believe that you must stick to what you are good at and limit the work that you do.
If, for example, I am involved in a property transaction, I get the advice of a property attorney – I don’t do it myself – and the same goes for a commercial transaction. If I, as an attorney, am doing it, then I would certainly not be comfortable representing a potential client or friend in a field of law in which I don’t specialise. Of course, I do have a better idea of that area of law than perhaps my friend or potential client has, but I think that only a specialist, who works with that field every day and all day, is aware of the up to minute changes. If I take my own field of law, being personal injury claims, the developments and changes with the case law and the legislation are so quick and so dramatic that I cannot believe that somebody who does not work in that field, on a day to day basis, could possibly keep up or achieve the same results than someone who does. I have seen far too many brain damage cases, for example, settled against the Road Accident Fund for ridiculous amounts of R50 000,00 and have taken over cases where a computer programmer, for example, who lost 60% of his fingers, was being advised by his attorney to settle the case for R43 000,00, when clearly, and even to his wife, it had to be worth much more. Stick to what you are good at and whatever you are looking at, whether it is plastic surgery or legal services, get a specialist in that field to help you.