I am looking forward to Neil Blomkamp’s next movie, which starts in South Africa today, called “Elysium”. His claim to fame, apart from growing up in Johannesburg, was that he directed the tremendously successful “District 9” and this is his follow-up movie. It stars Jodie Foster, Matt Damon and is apparently set in the year 2154 where the wealthy people live on a manmade space station called Elysium and the poorer people all live on a over-populated and devastated Earth.

It received pretty decent reviews with the critics on RottenTomatoes giving it 69% and 66% of people walking out and saying they like it, although that is quite a lot less than the 90% rating District 9 received in 2009. Most of the critics have praised Blomkamp’s skills as a filmmaker and his science fiction credentials, telling stories with a strong political undertones, but apparently the weakness of the movie is that the script is not great. The movie has taken in $68 million at the US Box Office so far, but again it is less than District 9 which took it $115,6 million. Elysium has not however finished its run in theatres and obviously can still make a lot more money.

I found over the years that just as it starts getting warmer, and one should be exercising more, that invariably I’ve done more damage to my weight. For some reason I managed to stabilise my weight in the coldest months, and as it starts warming up again, that is when I put on a few extra kilograms.

My biggest weight loss month over the years has always been January, and that is probably true of most people, probably followed closely by December and February. The key for me now is to increase the exercise now, even though we don’t have longer days, which makes it harder for walks, rides and runs and to watch very carefully what I eat.

There are no easy ways to lose weight and while diets do help, the simple truth that many people want to ignore is that it is really a combination of exercise, and I would certainly include walking as exercise, and eating much, much less. Most people eat way more than they need to and while some things are easy to give up, like the soft drinks and sugar, and those do make an immediate difference, the truth of the matter is that we are almost all accustomed to overeating and it takes a lot of effort and it is extremely difficult to cut down one’s eating and to turn away from the carbohydrates towards the proteins.

There is some good news ahead on the petrol price. The international price of petrol has gone down a little bit and if the Rand had stayed a little stronger wqe would have been looking at a 20 c drop in the petrol price.  Given its recent weakness we are looking at a petrol price decrease, at the beginning of September, of approximately 10c and diesel prices to stay pretty much the same. Obviously, this will change closer to the date but September is going to be the first month in some time where we will actually see a petrol price decrease and hopefully this trend can continue throughout the year.

One of the new trends, particularly with smart phones, are the various physical applications you can buy that work with your smart phone. That would include devices to connect to your bicycle so you can get distances and speeds from GPS co-ordinates, blood pressure machines and now wristbands. I have tired one called Up made by an American company by the name of Jawbone.

The wristbands track your movement, counting how many steps you take during the day and also monitor your sleep. When properly used, and I don’t think many of us have time to use these devices properly, they can record everything that you have eaten, how much sleep you’ve had, how much of it was a deep sleep and how much of it was a light sleep, how long you took to fall asleep and how often you got up during the day. As the image alongside illustrates, it al so counts all the steps you take in a day. The chart shows how little I move during the working day with a desk bound job and that its only after work that I went on a 55 minute walk.
The wristbands capture all of the data and then when connected to your smart phone, usually via the headphone plug, all the data is uploaded and analysed. Tracking what you eat takes a little bit more work and involves scanning bar codes, choosing images and you would need a lot more time to do that. The device works by including a motion censor and vibration motor in the wristband and while you sleep the band registers more subtle movements which are then processed via algorithms.

I love this time of year when each morning seems less cold than the morning before, and we have already had our first double-digit low day, when the temperature has not dropped below 10º. The rain is still some way off, with the rainy season really being October through to March in Johannesburg. Typically speaking, there are only two days with rain in August and four days with rain in September, so one has to wait until October before it rains every third day or so and by December and January it is typically raining every second day. By then, there will be 2 hours extra daylight a day as well - but certainly we are past the worst of winter now.

The General Council of the Bar is backing an amendment, proposed by the Democratic Alliance (DA), to reduce the power of the President and political appointees to appoint Judges in South Africa. If passed, and one would guess it is highly unlikely that anything proposed by the DA will be passed by Parliament, this amendment bill to the Constitution, the 19th such proposed amendment, would reduce the size of the JSC and reduce the number of political appointees.

I believe that Judges should certainly be chosen on the basis of who is the most competent and independent minded legal person that is qualified for the job. Judges need to be strong and independent and uphold the Constitution without fear or reporting to political masters. That has to be the goal of those who serve on the JSC and the less involvement politicians have in appointing Judges, the better from a lawyer’s point of view!

It is surprising, in some ways, that the court’s instructions to the NPA to hand over the so-called Zuma tapes have been ignored so often. These are the tapes that led to corruption charges against our President being dropped and the DA want to hear them. The Supreme Court of Appeal has already ruled that these must be handed over to the DA and on the basis of tenuous legal arguments the NPA have declined to hand them over for one year so far.

Judge Mathopo has now ordered that they have to be handed over in five days and it will be interesting to see if indeed they are handed over, which is probably unlikely, or in playing for time President Zuma and his advisors now launch another appeal. The highest court in the country has already ruled, and all of these games only make the President and his advisors look even worse. It makes one think that there is something on the tapes that would indicate that there was no real basis to drop the corruption charges against Zuma. It also creates interesting constitutional issues, because we have one body, namely the Presidency, ignoring the instructions of another, namely the judiciary and it is most unfortunate that the court decisions have not already been honoured and listened to. It damages the moral fibre of our country and endangers our democracy.

As attorneys are aware, some judgments really do take a long time. They are not necessarily on the most complex of matters, and sometimes in relatively simple matters one can await judgments for many months. Some judgments have apparently been outstanding for three or four years, and now four Pretoria Judges are apparently going to appear before Tribunals of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) to discuss these slow judgment periods.

There may well be some valid reasons for some of those delays, but convening such a Tribunal will also have the effect that Judges would not wish to be named in future, and it may well lead to judgments being issued faster in most cases than has previously been the case. The Law Society of the Northern Provinces said that if justice is delayed, justice is denied, and that there is thus a need for judgments to be delivered faster. The reserved judgment register, where attorneys record all reserved judgments, has clearly played a very valuable role in gathering the information and painting an accurate picture as to where the particular problems may be and the courts have advised that the next list, which will be published in January 2014 will be a public list – in other words, the names of the Judges involved in the judgments will be made public.

BlackBerry, which makes the smartphone by the same name and which used to be known as Research in Motion, is now trying to sell itself or find somebody who would like to do a joint venture with them. BlackBerry’s worldwide market share has apparently fallen the whole way down to 2,9% and the company’s share price over the last 5 years is down 92%. On the plus side the company does have $3 billion in cash and apparently has no debt but it has a product that, apart from one or two countries in the world, and South Africa is one of those countries, it does not appear to be able to sell its phones with much success. It would be surprising if the brand still exists in a few years time such has the dramatic fall been.

For many years scientists have not understood why people with diabetes have an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. An observational study in Washington has indicated, even amongst people who don’t have diabetes, that a higher blood glucose level can be associated with the greater risk of dementia.

The researchers tested both the fasting and non-fasting glucose measurements of the test group and they looked at other factors, which obviously increase the risk of dementia, such as high blood pressure and smoking. Doctors say that it is too early to warn people to change their diet as a result but that people should certainly stick to the basics – exercise regularly, maintain a normal weight and these in themselves should assist with reducing the damage done to the brain by high blood sugar, even if they don’t know now how exactly high blood sugar levels are damaging the brain.

Project Loon is a project of Google to bring Internet access to the whole world. Those of us who have it, don’t appreciate the fact that the majority of the world’s population still does not have the Internet. It is really science fiction at its best, with Google engineers sending balloons up into the stratosphere, where at 20 km above the earth, they float and go around the globe in winds while communicating back with earth.

This essentially allows them to be a network in the sky and will allow, as more of these balloons go up, people in deserted areas who do not have Internet, to be able to access the Internet. The project began in June 2013 above New Zealand’s South Island. Once they have gone through this pilot testing, they are going to take it to other places, apparently including South Africa, and so people will be able to access Internet in areas where people have not been able to before – out in rural areas, up mountains etc. You can imagine what this will do for tyrannical governments who may not be able to control which Internet sites their people see in the future given that they may not have control over the internet providers.

It is only a matter of time in South Africa before we hear more about bars misleading drinkers. This comes after the manufacture of a device called the True Spirit Authenticator which has recently been made available on the commercial market overseas. This device tests the various types of alcohol and can tell you whether or not it is the brand that you are paying for.

Recent tests where the device has been used in America have already led to the chain T.G.I. Friday’s settling with New Jersey state for $500 000,00 after it was discovered that, for example, when people order Bombay Sapphire Gin, they were not actually getting the brand they were paying for, but as you may suspect, in all cases were being given a cheaper brand. Apparently, many restaurants and clubs rely on the fact that people mix their drinks, and once they have mixed, will not notice the difference between a cheaper alcohol and a more expensive one and often substitute the cheaper one. This device, once it becomes more available around the world, is going to lead to some very embarrassing exposés for some restaurants, bars and clubs!

Some of those who watch diets carefully avoid some fruits saying they have too much sugar in them. Recent research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, however indicates that fruit, while it has sugar in it, can be eaten as much as you like. They say that fruit has no adverse health effects and that the sugar in fruit is absorbed more slowly as a result of the fruit’s fibre. There is thus not any surge in blood sugar and of course fruit helps us from overeating by making us feel fuller.

The one caution that they did raise is that you lose some of the benefits of the fruit when you turn it into juice. They say some of the metabolic benefits of the fibre are lost when the fruit is pulverised and the physical structure changes. Of course, there is also the important advantage that when you eat, you eat more slowly than simply drinking down a whole glass of juice, and so they do favour, where possible, that you rather eat the fruit than juice it.

Most people who have had a hangover will have suspected that hangovers do lead one to not functioning at your best. New research has indicated, apart from all the other symptoms of over-drinking, such as nausea and headaches, that as suspected, the brain also functions much worse after alcohol. This is not really a surprise but the interesting part is the actual effect on the brain and that is that it affects your working memory, which is your ability to hold information in your mind and work with that information. That would be the case, for example, if you are doing mental arithmetic. Apparently, once you are hungover, you would typically make 30% more mistakes than normal and it would lead to somebody, who are in their 20’s, having a reaction time equivalent to someone in their 40’s – which will not thrill the 40 plus brigade, of which I am one!

When one hears about programmes to sterilise the mentally unfit or the poor, one always thinks of Nazi Germany. In North Carolina in
America, the State has recently agreed to compensate people who were sterilised by their State’s Eugenics Programme. It ran from 1929 to 1974 – continuing even after all of the atrocities of the Second World War in Nazi Germany.

It has taken so long to agree on the compensation that three-quarters of the people who would be entitled to it have already died and the group that was meant to assist them, as a result of budget cuts, lacked the funds to do so. In many instances, there was actually nothing wrong with the people other than they were born into poor families and while men were also sterilised, 85% of those sterilised were women. One of the ladies leading the campaign, Elaine Riddick, said of her sterilisation, “They cut me open like I was a hog. What do you think I am worth? What do you think I am worth?”

It used to be that when you are involved in a scandal, you would have to resign. These days, around the world, there are new standards in politics. For example, a candidate for Mayor in New York City, Anthony Weiner, is determined to keep running for the position of Mayor, despite having confessed to sexting while married. He has been sending naked pictures of himself to various women, telling them he loves them and wants to get married and all of these usual that one reads about. His wife has come out and supported him and what makes this whole scandal so interesting is that it is a foregone conclusion by everybody that of course he should be able to run for political office having previously done this.

The only problem they really have with it now, is that after he had to resign from Congress two years ago for sexting other ladies some two years ago, he gave interviews with his wife where he said that he had therapy and has stopped the sexting as a result thereof. The concern now is not that he has done sexting, but that he has done it once before, apologised, been “treated and cured” and now, some two years later when he is running for political office again and is a favoured candidate, it has come out that even after he gave all the interviews saying he has changed, he in fact had not. So it appears that the new standard in politics is that’s its not a problem if you did something before, even recently, it’s only a problem if after owning up to a problem and then getting treatment for that problem, you announce that you have stopped that behaviour and then get caught again.

The big topic this week is the Zimbabwean elections and one has to doubt that they are going to be free and fair. For example, the voters’ roll in Zimbabwe indicates a total of more than 100,000 people who will be voting who are older than the age of 100 – that in a country with a very limited life expectancy. Another 1 million dead people were apparently on a previous version of the roll.

The final voters’ roll was only given to political parties on the evening of 30 July – the night before the election – so there are lots of irregularities that have already been noted. At the very least let’s hope that the run-up has been more peaceful than usual, but with busloads of Zimbabweans living in South Africa having being turned away at the border, one can already see the efforts that are made to block any possible MDC supporters from voting. It certainly does appear that the MDC have also been out-thought by Robert Mugabe and his party, and so I don’t think too many people are holding out hopes of a victory by them, in any event. The results are certainly going to be interesting and as usual it is going to be a tense time for the region, bearing in mind how much damage Zimbabwe and its political problems have already done to our own economy and the currency exchange rate over the years. The sooner the whole Zimbabwean situation is resolved, the better for South Africa and the other countries in the region.

I am happy to see, after DSTV apparently received a number of complaints that Bloomberg is back on DSTV channel 411. Apparently, the complaints that DSTV received were that business people prefer to have local and international business news on separate channels. That is the way they worded the statement, but it means something entirely different to me and that is that at times when they are awake a lot of business people prefer to watch the international channel as opposed to the local channel. That was after all the gist of my complaint in the first place and their original reasoning was that they will still show all the Bloomberg content but at 11 pm at night and that you would have the local content before 11 pm at night. That has now thankfully been reversed.