A british judge has ruled that being "Facebook friends" with someone doesn't necessarily make you their friend. He was ruling in a case where a woman was accusing her ex-boyfriend of "hounding her" by constantly sending her "friend requests".

An expert testified that Facebook was merely a vehicle through which people gave each other access to their profile pages, pictures and comments. He pointed out that some people had up to 1000 "friends" on Facebook and these couldn't possibly be regarded ...
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Just how far should we go with keeping secrets from our loved ones? Do "white lies" have a place in our lives? Look at the following examples.

Example 1
Your wife has just bought a new outfit and is very excited. Do you tell her that the outfit makes her look fat?

Example 2
You discover that your best friend's wife has been cheating on him. The wife begs you not to say anything, arguing that doing that will only hurt youur friend. She promises to mend her ways. Do you rush off to tell your friend...
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My friends and I were chatting about the crime situation in our country when the discussion turned to the pubishment of prisoners. Somebody commented that one of the reasons why crime was not subsiding was that prison time was no longer a deterrent. He complained that prisoners had too many rights; that prisoners were doing better than the average law-abiding citizen in that they had three meals per day and had a roof over their heads, rent free. Somebody else added that prisoners watched soa...

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Is it really fair to assume that every black person who occupies a senior post is an incompetent affirmative action appointee?

This assumption makes life unbearable for black managers, especially those in government departments and parastatals.The fact that people in government departments now have to apply for every senior post (as opposed to in the past, when promotions were automatic)  does not seem to faze those who are bent on making this unfortunate assumption.

Of course, even if these bl...
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Am I the only one who think that we no longer have as many rolemodels for our young people as we used to? Of course, your own parents can be your rolemodels, but I was thinking of societal rolemodels.

Many children regard celebrities as their rolemodels. Now the problem with that is, just about everybody is now regarded as a celebrity. One need only appear on TV once to become one.

While looking up to celebrities is in itself not a bad thing, the snag is that some of these young celebrities are...
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It is a well-known fact that, 13 years into our new democracy, some township parents still prefer to send their children to what  used to be known as Model C schools and to schools in the former white areas. I won't go into the reasons for this trend.

Some township people have complained that many of these children express themselves better in English (as opposed to their own home languages). Some say that these children tend to think that they know better than their supposedly less educated p...
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This morning The Chatroom on SABC 1 dealt with the issue of language purism. They had DJ Sbu Leope in the studio, who was earlier accused of speaking impure isiZulu on Ukhozi FM. Sbu's argument was that, through his show, he was trying to reach young Zulu-speaking people who needed to be guided and who looked up to people like him.

A white lady on the panel also spoke out about what she called purism, saying that the English we speak today was very different from Shakespeare's English.

A repres...
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Before the new dispensation South Africa had only four provinces: Transvaal, Cape Province, Natal and Orange Free State. These provinces were run by provincial administrations which did not have executive powers, i.e. they did not have legislative powers and were mandated by the central government to run the provinces.

The new Constitution then subdivided the country into nine provinces: Limpopo, North West, Northern Cape, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and West...

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The 2009 South African national and provincial election has come and gone and there is no doubt that the ANC will retain power with a two-thirds majority.

Mercifully, there were hardly any incidents of intimidation or violence. Many foreign observers feel that, on the whole, the elctions were free and fair.

However, I noticed that just about all the smaller parties were trounced. Some analysts are even questioning whether these parties should close shop and maybe join the bigger parties. Partie...

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