It would be wonderful if in South Africa we adopted some of the exciting developments implemented by the BBC, particularly live and free broadcast of, for example, the SABC and eTV channels. You can access them over any computer or phone, and simply watch then and there and we are talking about 4 or 5 channels including news and sport. You don’t need devices, decoders etc. The benefit, particularly at sports events is quite phenomenal in that, for example, you can line the route of the London Marathon, as I did during the Olympics, and then have the runners going past you and until they come past you again you can watch the action on your iPhone.

The image is not perfect, but it is pretty decent and you would be able to hear the commentary far better if either you had your earplugs or the crowd made a little bit less noise! I think it is just another sign of the future and especially if Apple comes out with what is rumoured to be a mini iPad, it would probably make a wonderful viewing platform. That then combined with 4G, which is going to be the next mobile revolution, and which will allow clearer transmission of the images and will make it really wonderful for slow motion replays or the like when you attend a live sporting event. A copy of a screen shot that I took from my iPhone indicating the clarity and the information that one can see on the screen appears alongside this article appreciating that if you select a smaller version, the quality would appear to be better, but it is not bad when you think of how many people were lining the streets and a large number of them would have been trying to stream the same data on overcrowded networks at the same time. 

The Paralympics these days generally follow on the Olympic Games, and it is amazing how much cheating goes on. Cheating first came to the fore when, after the Sydney 2000 Paralympics, the Spanish team who won the basketball gold medal in the mentally disabled category later admitted that they were all just students who had been faking that they were mentally disabled.

The most recent case involves Monique van der Vorst, a Dutch lady, who because of her alleged disability took part in the hand cycling, where people cannot use their legs. She won two silver medals in the Beijing Olympics, despite the fact that rumours were that she had been seen walking, on the dance floor and never had any problem with her legs. Her miracle story improved considerably and she proved to be such a good cyclist and even using her legs, that she is signed by Rabobank, the women’s professional cycling team.
She now claims that in 2010 she was in an accident and that her spine was suddenly knocked into place as a result of this accident and she could once again walk. Her legs which had wasted away terribly recovered miraculously and she became a professional cyclist! It is really sad in a world where people are fighting against so many disabilities that there are other people that are so eager to win something, just anything, that they will even fake disability so that they can take part in disabled sports, when they are not disabled, and obviously have an advantage over people who are genuinely disabled, to say the least.

I was admitted as an attorney on 29 August 1995 and that means, as of today, I have been an attorney for 17 years. It amazes me how quickly the time flies. At the Law Society they generally give out certificates of long service to attorneys who have been in practice for 25 years, which most people concede is long enough to turn you mad and that for me is only 8 years away!

I was assisted by my admission application by an advocate who has now become a Senior Counsel, by the name of John Peter and I have to say it was a very special day for me and I think it is for anyone who gets admitted to a profession. Law does not suit everybody, although the skills that you will learn from law suit the running of most business but it has increasingly become a profession where more and more people are fighting over less and less money while under extreme duress from clients. I don’t ever like to put people off because the truth is, no matter how many attorneys there are, you could still make a success of the profession, but there is no doubt that statistically that is not the right profession to be getting into in South Africa anymore, but that does not mean, on a case by case basis, and one individual compared to another, that somebody cannot have a rewarding career in law.

The events at Marikana reverberated around the world. It is one thing to be living in South Africa and understand that some things make the world headlines, but it is another thing to actually be overseas and to flip from one channel to another and see that videos of your police opening fire on strikers are on the news all the time. It really does present a shocking image of a developing nation that is out of control at times and of an extremely violent and aggressive society.

It is not the kind of headlines and images that would make anybody want to invest in South Africa because no matter who is to blame, it is a sign of a very poorly functioning society. On the one hand there are workers living in terrible conditions who are making, perhaps under the guidance of Unions, the most ridiculous demands for salary increases and on the other hand you have a situation that must have been mishandled by the police. I am not saying that somebody cannot open fire when their life is under threat, but when you have volatile situation like that, better preparation would include far more police on the scene and if necessary, the use of barbed wire, water canons and all the other tactics that South Africa has so much expertise in from the apartheid years in particular.

You cannot send a small little force of police to go and guard against thousands of strikers, many of whom appear in the video footage to have been extremely aggressive and brandishing weapons. The very fact that 34 people died and apparently 400 rounds of ammunition had to be fired tells you that the situation was totally out of control and that there has to have been, to a greater or lesser extent, an overreaction by the police on the ground and whether that overreaction is their fault, or the fault of others who sent them there in too small numbers and badly prepared, is something that the investigation needs to reveal.

50 Shades of Grey is the new bestselling book around the world by E L James. It is meant to be, because I have not read it, a fairly simple book with quite a lot of eroticism in it, but what I do know is that the author is becoming exceedingly wealthy from the book.

In the United Kingdom alone it has been topping charts week after week, with unprecedented sales, in excess of 500,000 a week and even though it has slowed down recently, it is still selling more than 200,000 copies each and every week. This means it is now far more successful than Harry Potter and even past all the Da Vinci Code books as well. The critics certainly make it clear that it is not an incredible work of fiction saying that it is really ordinary writing but perhaps that is what you need if you want to sell a lot of copies to the wider public. In any event, this blog is, like many of mine, more about educating me, and I look forward to reading all the comments and replies, preferably from people who have read the book as to what they thought and why it is so successful. Literary success is still however very well rewarded – she is estimated to be worth $15 million and even Time Magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world!

Great Britain dramatically improved its results at London 2012 by winning far more medals than they had at any other previous Olympics. They did that however by spending a considerable amount of money, most of it from the National Lottery. UK sport for example has a £125 million annual budget and so for example, the medals that they did not win in Archery, because they never won any, cost £4,4 million and I mention that figure because South Africa invested approximately R33 million altogether in our Olympic efforts and Great Britain spent in excess of R50 million on Archery alone and never won a single medal!

They did fantastically well in cycling, having won 12 medals, but they also spent £26 million to win those 12 medals. The four medals they won in gymnastics cost £10,7 million, the 9 medals they won in rowing cost £27 million, the 5 medals they won in sailing cost £22 million and in swimming, where like South Africa, they won 3 medals, they spent £25 million. It shows you what can be achieved with money and of course we live in a developing nation where we cannot possibly spend that amount of money on sports as opposed to education (where we don’t seem capable of delivering the textbooks taxpayers pay for), but you have to marvel at what, for example, our swimmers achieved on a total budget of R33 million across all sports, when the British athletes had, in our money, more than R300 million allocated just to swimming alone!

I recently met up with some old friends from school and we had a wonderful conversation about different people that we knew over the years, who had been huge talkers as to what they would be doing in life and what they would be achieving and it is quite interesting that the experience seems to be quite common that those that announce, particularly in the latter years at school, as to what they are going to be doing, or even make allegations there and then as to what they are currently doing, are invariably the people who are still living with their parents 20 years later and have not done anything at all with their lives.

There seems to be some sort of attitude when one is at school, whereas on the one hand there is a lot more teasing than happens later in adult life, that people seem to accept the stories or fantasies of sociopaths and psychopaths, who have free reign with the ludicrous stories they can make up about the various businesses, projects and who knows what else they are allegedly involved with, and that young people, who are pretty critical about most things, seem to blindly accept all of that.

It is also true of a business where you will often get, even within a company, those who are capable of talking and impressive talk as to what it is they do, what they will be doing, how they will be doing it and somehow or other don’t actually ever seem to be able to get down and do the work and then you get those, who often in a more quiet way, just get on with the work and do it. Sometimes they don’t think they have been noticed, but I think in most companies, whether the boss and managers reveal it or not, they have a pretty good idea as to who the amazing talkers are and who the actual amazing workers are – and normally they are not the same people!

We saw two fantastic athletes at the Olympics, both of whom may well be running different events by the 2016 Olympic Games. Usain Bolt is the best sprinter in all history and I was stunned that people were talking of the chances of his fellow competitors before the men’s 100 metre final. Anybody watching the semi-finals would have known who was going to win the final and it was no surprise that he managed to hold on for the 200 metres.

The problem with Usain, as he basically said himself, although in not so many words, is that he does not like training and while he can get away with it over 100 metres on pure talent, he cannot really run any other distance without making more effort with his training, something he does not seem to want to do anymore. Most people would like to see him one day running the 400 metres because they feel that he had smashed the world record of Michael Johnson, including Michael Johnson himself. On the other hand, none of us want to see Usain Bolt, who has won the 100 metres in two Olympics in a row, being beaten, especially if he is beaten only because he has not been putting in much effort and so one hopes, and if he decides to stick with the 100 metres, or indeed stick with athletics, that he will make sure that he is at his best in four years’ time. One assumes if he is not, and he is already speculating out the fact that he may not run again, that he then will not run.

Mo Farah achieved a feat that those of you who have not run might struggle to imagine. There have been some amazing swimmers over the years, but there is no doubt that it is far easier to wrack up tons of gold medals in swimming than it is in athletics with a whole range of different strokes, which are fairly similar over a whole range of distances which are not that dissimilar in swimming. To win the men’s 10,000 metres on an athletics track, and a week later step down to a distance half as long, and still have the strength to win that is really a sign of a formidable athlete and where you have to watch out for the name Mo Farah is when he moves on to the marathon distance of 42,2 km because he has enough pace and endurance, not to mention the sheer willpower that we saw in the 5,000 final, to one day not only win gold at the 2016 Olympics, if he peaks at the right time, but certainly somewhere along the line, to break the world record for the marathon.

The English Premier League is under way again, and this is certainly England’s premier export to the world. The teams are big business, as Manchester United’s listing on the American Stock Exchange again proves. If you don’t have millions, and we are talking Pounds and not Rands, to invest in new players, you also don’t have a hope of winning the League, which is why it is won, year after year, by the same teams.

One can basically cut the League down to three teams this year with possible winning chances and that is Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea and they will probably finish in that order too! Manchester City has benefited from the most money invested in recent years, and it is going to be hard to see them not winning the title again, although their supporters will probably hope not in a dramatic style that they won it last season, when they effectively came from behind and won the League in injury time. Interestingly enough, despite their worldwide popularity, for the first time in many years Manchester United have still not sold out all their season tickets and tickets for their first few games are still available on sale.

I have to say that I really thought the previous Batman movie was far btter than this, the last in the series. They are all superbly produced and filmed and the action sequences are all terrific, but where any fantasy movie requires you to suspend reality for a while, this one takes it a little far. One is put at a bottom of a pit, in Kazakhstan or some other far-off Eastern European country, Bruce Wayne gets his back repaired simply by someone pushing his vertebrae back into his back and that is just one example of the many ludicrous turns of events in the last hour or so of the movie.

It is no doubt going to be a huge world-wide hit, and is already, despite the fact that many people are going to feel slightly uncomfortable sitting in the theatre, after the tragic events that unfolded in America, and while it is certainly entertaining, it is not a great movie. I would say that in my opinion the previous Batman movie was a good movie, and this one is fine and entertaining, but a little bit weak over the last hour or so of the movie. It is a pity that movies cannot be made a little bit shorter, and there is nothing wrong with the good old fashioned 1 hour 40 minutes for a movie, and it seems now that every single movie has to run in excess of 2 hours. This one is particularly long, meaning that if you see a night show, it is going to end pretty late, given that it is 2 hours 45 minutes long. The Rottenomatoes site currently rates the movie at 87% whereas the Dark Knight, which was released in 2008, received 94%. I would say that the difference between the two movies is more considerable than that.

Record temperatures in America, with cities like Oklahoma, recently having experienced 49°C, floods, draught, storms and snow in Johannesburg and yet we all seem to think, or at least a lot of people do, that we are not really experiencing climate change. That is pretty much almost the official policy, for example, for the Republican Party in America, that regard most scientists who allege that there is climate change as being whackos who are all exaggerating the situation.

One cannot help but feel, just having a look at Johannesburg, that snow which used to be a once in 20 or 30 year occurrence, is suddenly becoming far more common – we just had it the other day at our offices, as the picture alongside illustrates and yet it was only 4 or 5 years ago that I got up in the middle of the night in my then house, and made a video of the snow falling then. A once every 20 or 30 year occurrence suddenly seems to be happening every 3 or 4 years, and rather than being an isolated event, is beginning to look like it is becoming more of a pattern – maybe in 10 or 15 years’ time it will snow a little bit in Johannesburg every winter? Temperature extremes are becoming more common, and it is quite clear that the one thing human beings still have no way of controlling, and are unlikely to be able to, is the weather.

This is another country that is undergoing massive strife, as the rebels take on the government forces. It is amazing how the Middle Eastern leaders, without ever having held genuine elections, seem to feel that they can cling onto power forever.

What is more frightening, in cases like this, is when they use their military weapons against their own people and you read horrific stories of snipers for example dragging women to the top of buildings and throwing them off to their deaths, and then shooting husbands or boyfriends that come and try to retrieve the bodies. Whole families have been executed and despite all of this, the Russian government led by Putin, continues to support Syria. The UN Peace delegation led by Kofi Annan, has given up which has annoyed Russia because they can now no longer pretend that there is actually a peace process going on, which has been their excuse for supporting the Syrian government. Approximately 80 to 100 people die a day, most of them being shot in the head at point blank range and sadly, and because of Russian support at the United Nations, nothing has been done.

When I was at University, in order to become an attorney, you first had to get another degree, and then go on and study your law degree or LLB. In order to accommodate people, and particularly bearing in mind the shortage of attorneys from the previously disadvantaged community, the government made the decision that going forward one would be able to do just one degree, namely the four year LLB degree. I think that that was probably the best decision, although it did mean that straightaway a whole new generation of attorneys would have only one degree whereas two degrees had been common. I cannot say that my first degree taught me anything else about law, but I do think it gave me a better overall education, and it is sad, in the interest of getting more people into the profession, that today’s attorneys miss out on that.

A Judge recently said that while he also could not criticise the motive from then reducing the length of the LLB to 4 years in 1998, which was previously 5 years, but felt that the decision was now hampering graduates. He said that it was optimistic to believe that matriculants could be efficiently equipped to enter the legal profession within fours years by just doing a four year LLB degree. His criticism of most of the new attorneys was that many of the new graduates lack communication skills and a basic understanding of the legal process and how to handle a case.

The London Olympics draw to a close today, and certainly I think they have done wonders in terms of promoting London, not to mention convincing the British that they are better at sports than they sometimes think they are. They obviously don’t win medals at track and field items in the numbers that the Americans do, nor the Russians or Chinese, and this has been their most successful Olympics in history in terms of medals won not to mention the wonderful advert for the country and London in particular.

The closing ceremony tonight promises to be spectacular, with the best seats going at £1 500,00, but it is certainly something that I would prefer to watch on TV at that price! Earlier in the day, the men’s marathon will be run and that obviously gives people a chance to take part in the Olympics at little or no cost, because although they are running a route through Central London, that is free to view anywhere along the route and with them running multiple laps, you will get to see the athletes on a number of occasions. The atmosphere will be wonderful with hundreds of thousands of people crowding the streets.

The IMDB movie database describes the movie as “…tells a true story of the greatest 70’s US rock icon who never was, how he was rediscovered in a far off land and finally became the legend he always deserved to be. It is a story of hope, inspiration and the power of music.” I went to see the movie recently, and it is a wonderful documentary that will bring tears to the eyes because it tells a story of a man who really was an international rock star in only one country in the world, and that country happens to be South Africa.

Back in America, he spent most of his time working on construction sites doing basic work, although in his spare time he did study philosophy. In South Africa, he was one of the biggest sellers of all time, selling more albums than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and eventually, despite stories that he was dead, two South Africans, one being a writer, traced him, got hold of his daughter and arranged for him to come and tour in South Africa. This was a man basically living in poverty in America, whose record company does not appear to have ever given him any of the proceeds of all of the 500,000 plus records that he sold in South Africa, and he got to perform in front of huge crowds, night after night, in front of his daughters who got to see that he was (although he never was in America) a superstar in South Africa. When you know the songs that he sung, and they are still songs that are played in South Africa, you will be stunned to discover that he really never sold more than about “6 records” in America, according to the record producer who does not appear to have paid him any of the proceeds, but sold more than 500,000 in South Africa. Songs like “I Wonder”, “Sugarman”, etc and the time played that they have always had in South Africa would have led any of us to believe, until I saw this movie, that Rodriguez was an international star, but sadly for him, he was not and in fact after the South African concerts which he has done on a number of occasions, he returns to his construction work in America. It is actually unbelievable when you listen to the songs, or read the lyrics, that he never made it and I think he was just probably too far ahead of his time and now at the age of 70, because of this documentary, he probably has more chance of selling albums than he ever did before.

If you enjoy documentaries or if you enjoy any of his music, I strongly recommend that you watch this movie which is obviously only going to be shown at the Art movie houses and not at the regular theatres showing the normal horror and teenage nonsense movies. The documentary has already won numerous awards including at the Sundance Film Festival. Just in case you don’t remember any of the songs, I will give you the lyrics to “I wonder” song that is very well-known in South Africa:

“I wonder how many times you’ve been had
and I wonder how many plans have gone bad.
I wonder how many times you had sex.
I wonder do you know who will be next.
I wonder, I wonder, wonder I do.”

The 94^th PGA Championship takes place at Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina this week. If I tip Tiger Woods again, he will not have a chance of winning, so perhaps I should not. The one thing in his favour this particular week is he really is an athlete, he is superbly fit and strong and like most super fit athletes, he will not fade away when it gets hot, and the weather will be incredibly hot and the course terribly windy.

It is meant to be a terribly tough course, which will suit the guys who do well in tough conditions – which also includes Ernie Els and Retief Goosen from South Africa, who generally come to the forefront in tournaments where everybody does not score that well. It might also suit Louis Oosthuizen. There has been a long run now of tournaments where there has not been a repeat winner of a Major and so it is going to be interesting to see if at last we do get a repeat winner – somebody else who has won this year or somebody who has won in recent years. In fact, Tiger Woods has not won a major since 2008, even though he has won three tournaments this year, more than anybody else. Sadly, for golf fans, it is also the last major of the year – in other words, until next year’s Masters in April 2013, there is not another major this year and so for all professional golfers this is the last chance, for 8 months, to add a major to their CV!

South Africa has really been doing exceptionally well at the Olympics, particularly if you consider the small size of our nation, and more importantly, how little money we put into sports compared to other nations. That is not to say we have money to put into sports when we have millions of people who don’t have clean running water, or even their own toilet in their own house, and so it is absolutely understandable that the emphasis in our country is on basics, as opposed to, as they do in Australia, spending millions on putting together top sporting teams. Having said that, it appears that with tenacity and “can do” attitude of our athletes has allowed them to once again come to the fore. Naturally, we normally win our most medals in swimming and we probably will not win too many in track and field items but I think we have already done ourselves proud.

The Olympic results, with some great early success for South Africa, clearly show who the dominant nations in the world are. The two most powerful nations in the world at the moment are without doubt the United States and China, and as expected they lead the medal totals so far. There are some countries that punch above their weight, largely because they spent a lot of money on promoting sport, like Australia, but otherwise the medals are pretty much won, and surprisingly according to the size of the nation and their economic wealth, with the dominant powers naturally being the two dominant economies in the world at the moment.

It is almost as if the other countries, with perhaps the exception of Japan and Russia, are really scrapping for one or two medals each. South Africa has done very well out of swimming, and it shows you how much the inspiration of somebody like Penny Heyns, many years ago now, has really led to generations of swimmers believing that they can win Olympic gold medals. We take home a few more gold medals every four years than we should, relative to the size of our country and just as the success of Gary Player in golf has inspired generations of golfers to believe that they can compete at any level, we can thank those like Penny Heyns for the success that we now see our swimmers achieve. It is amazing, as it is with all aspects of life, when people see they can win at something, how it encourages a whole lot of more people in that particular country to believe that they are good enough when it comes to that activity to be the best in the world, despite the fact that we will never have the money or the equipment that countries like the United States or Australia can spend on sport.

I think one of the reasons men love sport so much is that it gives you drama in a way that is generally not believable. It is like soap operas with scripts that actually happen in sports events, people would dismiss it as unbelievable, as was the case with Ernie Els’ win of the Open.

As much as it was a fantastic result for South Africa and for Ernie, at the end of the day it was handed to him on a plate by Adam Scott. A professional golfer, with the lead that Adam Scott had, in playing the holes that he had in front of him could and should have won the tournament fairly comfortably. To lose it, without even going into a play-off, was a shock result and while Ernie did his very best to get to a competitive score, his score should not have won the tournament. It once again illustrates how much of golf is played in the head, and that the pressure of leading, something that Ernie never had throughout the entire tournament, can get to anyone, even a player with a considerable lead as Scott had.

As excited as I was for South Africa and for Ernie, one could not help but feel terribly sad for Adam Scott. One hopes that he will recover from this loss and write the next exciting drama for a story, but it is hard to imagine that this is not going to do considerable emotional and mental damage to him, because he is going to realise that Ernie Els never won the Open but that he gave it away. Adam Scott had the chance to win a major, to record his place in history and when he realised that, he lost the plot and lost it.
 

England is allowing asthma pumps to be sold in normal shops, without a doctor’s prescription from now on. The inhalers, typically in a blue plastic container, contain the drug Salvutamol and typically you use it if you are feeling wheezy or in my case, before I go on a run as I have exercise induced asthma. It is great to see that such necessary medication, which I really don’t think has many negative consequences, will now be available in shops as opposed to having to go to a doctor, get a script and then go to the pharmacy to purchase it and much like Panado’s, there is a justification.