Almost everybody listens to music these days on sound devices like iPods or other MP3 players. iPods are also beginning to replace Hi-fi’s in most people’s houses, but in some ways they should not – the sound quality, while perfect for jogging or listening while exercising, is nowhere near that of a CD.

A CD’s sound is typically recorded at 1411 kbps and an MP3 is typically at 128 kbps. That figure alone shows you that the sound quality in your typical MP3 is of a dramatically worse quality. Record producers still make high quality sound, but it is typically substantially downgraded to listen to on an iPod, or other MP3 player, leaving out much of the finer detail. One can only hope with the increased bandwidth and faster download speeds, that there will no longer be a need to compress the sound so much, and we can start seeing a movement towards better quality sound, just as we have with television quality improving with HD TV. Most people who watch TV on HD actually struggle to watch any other format of TV once they got used to HD and so hopefully it will be with sound.

Louis Oosthuizen has just won a European Tour event, coming off his fantastic Master’s finish. Branden Grace, following two wins on the European Tour earlier this year, this weekend won the China Open to become one of the few players to win three times in the European Tour in a year – and let us not forget there are still another 7 months left in the year!

It has really been a fantastic few months for South African golfers, and it is incredible that our golfers do as well as they do, in a country with 150 000 registered golfers, compared to 30 million in America. We almost had a dream finish in The Masters when we had Charl Schwartzel waiting to put on the winner’s jacket onto the winner, and his friend Louis Oosthuizen tying for first, only to lose in a play-off. Louis made a mistake in not committing to his driver, which he had been hitting fantastically, and instead, when up against a guy who is amazing with trick shots and bad lies, namely Bubba Watson, decided that Bubba was in trouble and played safe. Bubba Watson can play his way out of any trouble and did, and Louis’ safety first approach ended up costing him. He was still magnificent under pressure and never missed any of the putts that he needed to get, and is going to win numerous golf tournaments over the next 15 years or so. He is currently No 12 in the world, and he is certainly going to go higher – much higher.

The whole E-toll saga has been very poorly managed, from start to finish, as has, in my mind, the opposition to it. It does not appear that many people have signed up to take part in protest, there has not been any major website petition, such as Stop the Bill petition of two or three years ago, and quite frankly I think it is all going to go through, whether it is delayed by a court decision now or not.

Certainly, I do believe that there has been a lot of public consultation on the issue and they are not going to succeed in court on that point but they may struggle to show why, if you have not registered for the E-tags, you have to pay six times more, which seems unreasonable. There are various articles and even an attorney’s letter floating around explaining how much of a disadvantage you are at, if you sign all the E-tag conditions. I had to sign them the other day, via Nedbank, for my company and company cars, and it ran for pages of onerous conditions but I would rather sign up for pages of onerous conditions and pay 15% or 20% of the price than the full price face a range of other sanctions. Those other sanctions include being hauled off the highway eventually – which is probably unlikely for most, but you can rest assured that you will eventually be sued, paying legal costs, paying interest, etc, etc and basically one is being forced into signing an agreement that most of us probably do not agree with at all and I do hope the National Consumer Commission has something to say about that.
 

The annual edition of the Golf Digest Top 100 courses in South Africa is out, and it is one that most golfers look forward to. It lists the top courses as rated by them in the country and then also breaks them down by Province.

The top course in the country, back to number 1 after a year at number 2 is Leopard Creek and The Fancourt Links is now number 2. The Gary Player course at Sun City is the number 3 course in the country and the number 1 rated course in Gauteng, and number 6 in the country is Blair Atholl. Golf Digest describes Blair Atholl as, “… Player's homage to Augusta National, but while the undulated nature of the course, and its challenges, resembles Augusta in places – certainly in the quality of the conditioning – this is a far bigger and more sprawling golf course.”
The Woodmead course at Country Club is rated the 23rd best course in the country, Pecanwood drops down to 26 and Dainfern continues its slide, now down to 73rd. Courses have to be open for three years or more before they qualify for the top 100 and so next year we will see the introduction of Houghton as well Serengeti and it will be interesting to see how these two Jack Nicolas layouts do.

Politicians never stop being in the news, people being suspended, then put back in their position, allegations of corruption and who knows what else, politics is always very interesting. Julius Malema at the moment does not seem to want to give up, and accept that his time really has come and gone, and I am somewhat surprised that there are still those who believe that we have not heard the end of him in terms of being a senior leader of the ANC. The lesson we can all learn from what has happened is that one really has to think carefully about what you say, and one cannot just shout one’s head off, at all times, while criticising the world. I think he really had a tendency to speak without thinking or investigating the facts properly and too often without having any regard to what the policy of his organisation is.

When you are a member of an organisation or of a company, you always have to speak within the limits of the policy and beliefs of that organisation or firm, and no organisation or company will ultimately tolerate people who don’t have the discipline to do so. Jacob Zuma is also getting married again for the fourth time and the media has always referred to the lady he is marrying now before, so it is not really as if somebody new has joined the family! It is certainly a very interesting and contrasting society that we live in, with people speaking different languages, practice in different religions and having different belief systems.

20 April 2012 sees the next stage in the campaign to have Joseph Kony of Uganda arrested. Campaigners are going to plaster many American cities with posters on 20 April 2012, all trying to draw attention to their campaign to have the leader of the Lords resistance army brought to justice. There are some critics of the campaign, saying that the video glosses over many important things, and does not detail how impossibly difficult the terrain where he hides and operates from is, but I think that anything that helps to draw attention to dictators and tyrants around the world is very important and there is no doubt, in this age of the Internet, where reputations can be destroyed in a few days, if not hours, and that dictators all over the world in particular have to look out. While rulers of countries can sometimes block Internet access to areas, it is becoming harder and harder to do that with satellite technology, and they are all eventually going to pay the price.

It is tremendously sad that there seems to be some type of power disease that afflicts elderly men, once they become a president of a country and that they have to go on and on, clinging to power or trying every trick in the book, like Putin, to be re-elected and to have another 12 years in power. It really becomes embarrassing for the country, and clearly, as you can even see with the Russian people, it is not something that they want. New ideas and new concepts don’t come about when you have the same person leading one country for 24 years as Putin plans in Russia.

It is all too easy to subscribe to what is called a VAS – or value added service on your cellphone but it is quite difficult to deactivate it later, when you find that you are not using it. In my case I subscribed to two services about two years ago that I have not really used, involving being able to find my phone or send a message for help and the monies continued to tick off at R12 a month. It is not much, but when you add it up, together with all the other services you have to pay for – such as having to pay for itemized billing, which is something you should get for free, given that cellular companies should be showing you what you are paying for without you having to pay extra for it.

When I wanted to cancel the service I had to phone their number, after I got no response to a letter I wrote to them, on 082 111 and they had to ask not only what my ID number was, but which bank I bank at, and obviously they are needed to know my mobile number but in addition to that they wanted to know how many contracts I have with them (which would be a few for the company) and a whole host of other questions before I could cancel the service. I honestly felt like I was being forced to jump through hoops, to cancel something whereas I should be entitled to have it cancelled as easily as it was able to be put on my account and charged to me!

Children born in the last few years are now all vaccinated against pneumonia and pneumococcal disease. The vaccine used, Prevnar 13, protects children against the bacterial infections that cause meningitis, pneumonia and other diseases. The vaccine also protects against a virulent subtype of the streptococcus bacteria that has actually become resistant to antibiotics, and obviously having the vaccine then guards one against this. Meningitis is particularly dangerous, killing up to one in four people who get it and leaving many deaf. The vaccines also reduce many types of ear infections as well as sepsis for bloodstream infections.

Pneumovax 23 is a vaccine, that once the minor pain and soreness at the vaccination site is gone, protects adults against the same diseases, together with an additional 10 strains protecting one against most forms of pneumococcal bacteraemia. We are indeed fortunate that we live in times where more and more diseases can be successfully challenged, and that where some diseases have become antibiotic resistant, we can now have vaccines for them. Since the PPV23 vaccination has been made available, there has been a significant reduction in deaths in countries where it is widely used.

I recently had to collect all of my new credit cards, it is something that one typically has to do every two or three years and was glad to see that they have all now moved to the chip and PIN cards in South Africa. Some of my cards had been replaced the year or so ago but some of the older ones have now been replaced with the new cards and I think that it certainly adds an element of extra security to be forced to enter a PIN code when the card is used.

There are tremendous problems with the cloning of cards at the moment, which can happen for example, even when you use your card to pay for a meal at a restaurant if the waiter unbeknown to you swipes it through a device, which has happened to us and does not take long for you to start getting SMS alerts highlighting huge purchases “you” have just made all over Hyde Park! The SMS alerts are an additional safety feature, and I think that anybody who has a bank account or credit card needs to do that – one of my former staff members was for example hit by a number of R2 000.00 withdrawals from her account in December, but did not have the SMS service and only discovered it after quite some money was taken out over a number of days.

I enjoyed The Hunger Games as a movie – and since I have never read the books, I have nothing to compare it to. Its sales records around the world are going fantastically well and it has been getting rave reviews so it will no doubt be very busy here in South Africa also. It was superbly acted, well filmed and draws you into the action. I cannot say that I found it as good as the reviews suggested – but that’s possibly because they made it out to be perfect. If one goes to see something with too much expectation it can sometimes disappoint. The Hunger games didn’t disappoint me, because it is still a very good movie, and will continue to set records. I would certainly recommend it to anyone keen to see a good movie in the next few weeks and I will look out for the sequels which will follow. I was particularly impressed by the acting of Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role.

As a big Dr Seuss fan, I was really looking forward to see The Lorax. The reviews are somewhat negative saying it was a load of commercial nonsense and very disappointing and I hoped that those reviews had been given by people who perhaps don’t enjoy children’s movies.
I must say I was sad to find that they were correct, and while children will certainly enjoy it, it was one of those movies that I hoped would end soon – and not because it was a children’s movie, but because it really just was not well put together. Horton Hears a Who was very well adapted, from the book, and was a beautiful movie, which children loved and adults could relate to but The Lorax was filled with singing and all sorts of nonsense themes and while it does get across its message of saving the environment, it was a tremendous disappointment for me – but that is not the case for children.

A number of decisions in America have effectively led to manufacturers of generic drugs to be incapable of being successfully sued. A Supreme Court decision in America last year said that generic pharmaceutical companies do not have control over their labels, and thus cannot be sued for failing to alert patients about the risk of taking the drugs. They don’t have any control over the label because the law in America provides that they must simply use whatever label was used by the original drugs manufacturer, as updated from time to time. This was a split decision of the Supreme Court on a 5-4 basis.

Essentially the majority ruled that generic companies cannot be held responsible for not alerting patients about problems with the drugs they are selling and that is the responsibility of the brand name company that develops the drug. In other words, if you took the brand name drug and you had a problem, you would be able to sue them but if you took the generic, you cannot sue the brand name company, because you were not using their product. The generic drug manufacturer would be able to avoid responsibility on the basis that the labelling and the warnings on the various medications are not their responsibility. The generic companies say that they should never be held responsible for the cost of updating their labels, because that would turn their cheaper versions of the pills into more expensive pills, because of all the extra costs involved and thus consumers would not benefit as they do now from reduced costs.

It leaves one in a very difficult situation where effectively, in case something ever goes wrong with you, you would need to take the brand name drug, and not the generic drug, so that if something did happen to you, you would at least have a legal case against the manufacturer of the original drug. One would hope that the American laws will be changed in time because this sort of situation is unacceptable – and it is really unfair that somebody takes a pill that is identical to a brand name, is effectively left without any legal remedy to sue for compensation when something goes wrong.

The Masters is the first of the four major golf events of the year, and some would argue it is the most prestigious. This year’s favourite is going to be Rory McIlroy, with Tiger Woods as second favourite and of course Charl Schwartzel from Blair Atholl just outside of Lanseria, will be defending his title. We’ve had amazing South African success in this tournament in the last three years, with Trevor Immelman also winning it, and one can only dream that a South African will win it again, but my personal favourite is Tiger Woods.

I am a big Tiger Woods fan and I invariably tip him, and am wrong again and again, but there are some good reasons why he should go very close here. Firstly, in the last two years he has been in terrible form, but he still managed to do well at Augusta where The Masters is played. He is clearly in much better form in the last few months than he has been in the last two years. Secondly, it is the one major tournament that he has always done well at, and however few events he wins in coming years, I still believe he is going to win at Augusta again. When I last looked his odds were 8/1, which I thought were fairly fair, as I would expect him to win at least one out of nine majors held at Augusta – if not three or four. In short, for those who don’t understand golf, I am basically saying this is like a home course to him and he is in good enough form on other courses and if he carries that through to this particular course, which he knows so well, he will win.

I have recently finished reading The Big Miss, which is Hank Haney’s story about how he coached Tiger Woods. It is interesting to note all the media excerpts from something that you have read yourself, because it tends to be a one-sided story, where we are basically told that Tiger Woods was not particularly nice socially. Obviously, we should all endeavour to be the very best that we can, and not to get inflated opinions of ourselves, but it is also unfortunate, when somebody has achieved in any field, that we always try to drag them down or attack them because we don’t feel that they are a good enough husband, father, kind person or some or other criteria.

At the end of the day, Tiger Woods puts his sporting ability out there, and we are welcome to comment on that, but just as we don’t normally really know the boss socially, we don’t know Tiger in that way and we cannot judge him simply by what others say, because we don’t really know how Tiger Woods felt about those type of people and whether or not they were allowed to become involved in his life. For example, Hank Haney says that Tiger never really spoke to him socially, and even when he spent time at Tiger’s house, Tiger never really spoke to him much, so there is some criticism to be levelled, that he cannot really know what he is talking about when he talks about Tiger Woods as a person when he himself makes it clear that Tiger never really let him into his life.
What he can talk about is Tiger’s ability, and the title of the book basically relates to Tiger[‘s desire to eliminate bad misses from his game – a miss with a golf club that leads to taking penalty shots, for example. What Hank Haney does say, and of course he is no longer Tiger’s coach, is, and these are the quotes that are not really being quoted in the media, but should be, “I firmly believe that no-one has ever played the game of golf as well as Tiger Woods. … Even with deeper competition than ever, Tiger’s total career winning percentage of 26% from 1996 through to 2011 is more than twice that of Jack’s 12%. … Tiger is even more dominant when it comes to closing out tournaments. He has gone on to win after holding or sharing the lead going into the final round at officials events 48 out of 52 times, and off the charts conversion rate of 92% and that is probably his most admired record among his peers and past greats. More than any other player, Tiger has expanded the idea of what is possible.”

I was surprised to read recently, on 1 April 2012, that the British government was looking at introducing laws that would allow it to monitor e-mail. Because I read that news on the 1st April, and actually thought it was an April fool’s joke, because I really could not see the British people accepting that. What happens in other countries is always very important, because politicians around the world tend to mimic each other’s laws, particularly when they are convenient to them and if a strong democracy like England is considering laws which will allow all e-mail accounts to be monitored, then you can rest assured that other countries are going to follow shortly.

Sadly, it was not an April fool’s joke and while one understands on one hand the security concerns and how terrorists can be monitored like this, the history of political and social development typically shows that these types of laws are soon abused. First, for politicians to watch their rivals and ultimately to monitor what anybody is doing. As it is, and even in America, it is widely reported that cell phone companies give state entities incredible access – to the extent that in America they even have price charts for the local police forces – for example,$2 200 for access to all that person’s phone calls and lesser fees to simply use the built-in GPS tracking and the use of the various cellular stations, to simply tell the police where the user of that phone is. We are heading more and more towards a Big Brother world, where everything you do, from the e-mails you send to the phone calls you make and where you make them from, will be monitored and we as citizens will have to monitor that very closely for our own protection.

A recent survey, and they are few and far between, on aspirin, because of its lack of profitability given its low cost, indicates that it helps protect against cancer. People taking a low dosage of aspirin on a daily basis, as opposed to every two days, have shown to be at a considerably reduced risk of dying from cancer and also suffering from various types of cancers.

This appears to relate to aspirin’s ability to thin the blood which reduces the risks of strokes and also stops cancer spreading easily from one cell to another. It sounds like we should all be taking a low dosage of aspirin every day, although of course there are risks, especially for pregnant women and other people for whom aspirin sometimes causes stomach bleeding. The study included findings that after three years of daily aspirin use, the risk of developing cancer were reduced by almost 25% and after 5 years of daily aspirin use the risk of dying of cancer was reduced by 37%. Those are hugely impressive figures and a reduction of other cancers included by 46% in the case of prostate cancer.

This time of the year is definitely flu injection time, for anybody who is running a business and for anybody who is at risk from flu which includes the young and the elderly. I get all my staff to go for a flu injection every year, and have found that the incidents of serious flu breakouts in our offices have really been dramatically reduced.

I don’t mean to suggest that that would stop people from getting colds at any time of the year, saying that they have the flu, but most people forget that actual flu is much worse than a cold and largely indicated by high temperatures over a number of days. The sniffles or a bad cold is not the same as flu and of course one can keep working through that whereas with the high temperatures of flu you cannot work. Most companies follow this practice and I certainly recommend it for all businesses but I also do believe from a health point of view that it is much better to avoid exposure to this if one can. I am glad to see that the health department is running adverts this year, dispelling the common fallacy that you can get a cold or flu from the flu injection – you cannot, that is impossible and it is just a nonsense allegation as some people who want to avoid having the injection tend to make.

The months really fly by, and I find every year is faster than the one before. The evenings are getting colder already and are fairly chilly once you go outside after dark and there is no doubt that we are heading into winter, although I expect that we would get the usual last minute April rainfalls before that happens. Autumn is one of the most beautiful times in Johannesburg, with the gardens all still looking beautiful and the leaves beginning to turn red and orange and other shades of brown.